Contemporary Authors

• All-American Poem American Poetry Review (Philadelphia, PA), 2008
• Fifty American Plays: Poems Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2012
• Mayakovsky's Revolver W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2012
• Wonderland: Poems W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2018

1. Wonderland : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052697 Dickman, Matthew, author. Poems. Selections Wonderland : poems / Matthew Dickman. First edition. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] pages cm PS3604.I2988 A6 2018 ISBN: 9780393634068 (hardcover) 2. Mayakovsky's revolver https://lccn.loc.gov/2012018170 Dickman, Matthew. Mayakovsky's revolver / Matthew Dickman. 1st ed. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, c2012. viii, 93 p. ; 22 cm. PS3604.I2988 M39 2012 ISBN: 9780393081190 (hardcover) 3. All-American poem https://lccn.loc.gov/2008925017 Dickman, Matthew. All-American poem / Matthew Dickman. 1st ed. Philadelphia : American Poetry Review ; [Port Townsend, Wash.?] : Distribution by Copper Canyon Press/Consortium, c2008. xiii, 85 p. ; 23 cm. PS3604.I2988 A78 2008 ISBN: 97809776395649780977639540 (pbk.) 4. 50 American plays : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2011044747 Dickman, Matthew. 50 American plays : poems / Matthew Dickman & Michael Dickman. Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, c2012. v, 63 p. ; 21 cm. PS3604.I2988 A615 2012 ISBN: 9781556593932 (alk. paper)

• Brother - 6/9/2016 Faber & Faber, https://smile.amazon.com/Brother-Matthew-Dickman/dp/0571330207/ref=sr_1_6_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528056814&sr=8-6&keywords=Dickman%2C+Matthew

• Matthew Dickman Poetry - https://www.matthewdickmanpoetry.com/about/

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  Matthew Dickman was raised by his mother in the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland along with his sister Elizabeth and twin brother, the poet Michael Dickman. After studying at Portland Community College and the University of Oregon, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center. He was the recipient of a 2009 Oregon Book Award and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

  Dickman is the author of two full length collections, All American Poem, which won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, and Mayakovsky's Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012); and co-author, with Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon, 2012), and Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016). He is also the author of four chapbooks: 24 Hours (Poor Claudia, Portland & onestar press, Paris, 2014), Wish You Were Here (Spork Press, 2013), Amigos (Q Ave. Press, 2007), and Something About a Black Scarf (Azul Press, 2008). His third book, Wonderland, will be released by Norton in 2018.

  Currently, Matthew teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program and writes advertisements for a living. He lives in Portland with his partner and two children.

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/06/couplet-2

  Couplet
  A tale of twin poets.

  By Rebecca Mead

  Matthew and Michael Dickman. When the poems are read together, their resonance is amplified.
  Photograph by Jeff Minton

  One August afternoon, Michael and Matthew Dickman boarded a bus in Lents, the working-class neighborhood in southeast Portland, Oregon, where they grew up. Michael, who is six feet one and a half inches, with pale, freckled skin, sandy hair, and blue-green eyes behind glasses, and who was wearing a frayed blue shirt and a blue sun hat, slid into a seat toward the back of the bus. Matthew, who is six feet two, with pale, freckled skin, sandy hair, and blue-green eyes behind glasses, and who was wearing a black T-shirt, sank into a seat close by. It was hot outside, and the bus, which was headed downtown, offered refuge from the arid intersection where they had been waiting: Ninety-second and Foster, where a junk-filled antique store with “Closing Down” signs in its windows faced off against the New Copper Penny, an establishment that offered ladies’ nights, and was considerably more tarnished than its name suggested.

  The bus had barely swung into traffic when a stocky woman in shorts, with stringy, bleached hair, got up from her seat and stumbled toward Michael, clutching a Big Gulp. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, grasping a pole near Michael for support. “But are you guys twins?”

  It is a question that the Dickmans are used to hearing, though it seems to be asked ritualistically, rather than in a genuine spirit of inquiry: the brothers, who are thirty-three, are each other’s double, but for that half inch in height, and for slight, shifting distinctions in body weight, haircut, and eyewear. (Matthew currently favors glasses with squared-off black rims; Michael’s glasses, which have dark-brown rims, are marginally more ovoid.)

  “You’re so cute!” the woman on the bus said, gazing at the brothers.

  “He’s cuter,” Matthew replied, with practiced graciousness.

  Eventually, the woman returned to her seat, and started discussing twins with the driver. “They’re telepathic, you know,” she said. Several other passengers turned to assess the brothers, who bore the scrutiny of delighted strangers with the resigned equanimity typically shown by famous actors who have forgone Bel Air sequestration.

  Michael and Matthew Dickman are poets, and though the subject matter of each is varied, they often draw from a similar well of images and experiences: the rough neighborhood of their youth, with its violent fathers, beleaguered mothers, and reckless, neglected kids. Their verse, though, is strikingly different. Michael’s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew’s are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality. “Kings,” which appears in Michael Dickman’s first collection, “The End of the West,” just published by Copper Canyon, describes the twins’ contemporaries in Lents, exalted and downtrodden:

  They used to be good at being alive,

  pointing their index fingers at

  the trees, passing

  invisible sentences

  proclamations

  knighting the birds

  one by one

  All down my street the new fathers

  beat the kingness

  out

  of the

  kings

  In “Lents District,” which appears in “All-American Poem,” a collection published this past fall, Matthew Dickman also memorializes the neighborhood:

  Dear Lents, dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,

  I am your strange son.

  You saved me when I needed saving,

  your arms wrapped around

  my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around

  the school yard

  the night Jason went crazy—

  waving his father’s gun above his head,

  bathed in red and blue flashing lights,

  all-American, broken in half and beautiful.

  In Michael’s poems, a lot of things are described as dead: a cigar, hair, friends. In Matthew’s poems, hurried sexual encounters upstairs at parties recur. (“And probably not with the same girl,” Carl Adamshick, another Portland poet and a friend of the brothers, says.) Reading Michael is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind; reading Matthew is like taking a deep, warm bath with a glass of wine balanced on the soap dish. “There’s something of the pugilist in Michael,” Major Jackson, another poet friend of the brothers, says. “There is something hard-edged and tough about the speakers in his poems. Matthew has such a big heart; he has very lush, surprising turns in his work.” The poet Dorianne Laux, who has been a mentor to both Dickmans, says, “Michael is a Nureyev—each movement is articulated—but Matthew is a whirling dervish.”

  The Dickmans’ swift and simultaneous rise has aroused suspicion in some circles. “Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s,” Michael Schiavo, a young poet and blogger, wrote of “All-American Poem,” in a disparaging post six thousand words in length. Schiavo also declared that “the Dickman twins have put their life story, not their poetry, front and center, have made that the reason you should find them interesting.”

  In fact, the Dickman twins have made efforts to resist the pairing of their work, as does Michael Wiegers, the executive editor of Copper Canyon: Wiegers accepted Michael’s manuscript without knowing anything of Matthew, and initially opposed handling Matthew’s book, because, as he told me, “Somebody might see that as our attempt to try to make a circus act out of them.” It was only after Michael’s work had been accepted by Copper Canyon that Matthew discovered that his own manuscript had won the A.P.R./Honickman First Book Prize, the reward for which was publication by the American Poetry Review—with distribution through Copper Canyon.

  The Dickman brothers’ poems bear reading independently, but, together, the resonance of the work is amplified. Just as Frank McCourt and Malachy McCourt, in their separate memoirs, put forth a tragic and a comic interpretation of their family drama, and Tobias Wolff and Geoffrey Wolff provide overlapping portraits of their separated parents in “This Boy’s Life” and “The Duke of Deception,” the Dickman brothers offer two strong perspectives on a shared experience, even though it would be reductive to read either’s poems as frankly confessional or purely autobiographical. “It is shocking to people when they realize that I am almost always sleeping alone, and leaving parties alone,” Matthew told me, though to spend a couple of days walking around the streets of Portland with him is to witness his being greeted by—and grasping to recall the name of—more than one young woman upon whom he seems to have made an impression. (Michael, by far the less social Dickman, is often greeted with similar enthusiasm by strangers, until he identifies himself merely as the brother of Matthew.)

  Unlike the McCourts or the Wolffs, of course, Michael and Matthew share more than the same raw material; they share the same genetic material. Although there is a rich body of scientific literature on the subject of identical twins who have been separated at birth—their circumstances help to illuminate the competing influences of genetics and environment on the development of an individual’s health and sensibility—the Dickman twins, who were raised together and have been close their entire lives, seem to offer a parallel experiment. One way of looking at their work—Michael’s Dickinsonian severity, and Matthew’s Whitmanesque expansiveness—is as an illustration of the distinctiveness of imagination, even in two people who are as alike as two people can be.
  “I never got a chance to say ‘Shut up.’”

  One evening not long ago, after Matthew got out of work, the brothers met at Cassidy’s, a bar in downtown Portland. Matthew works at Whole Foods, behind the prepared-foods counter, where he earns eleven dollars an hour; Michael has a job as a prep cook at a restaurant across town, making nine-fifty an hour. The brothers got their first jobs the summer that they turned thirteen, working for a butcher in a local grocery store. “He would tell us how to clean the deboning knife with this machine, and he was also very interested in counselling us about relationships with girls—he would be spraying bits of body and blood, and explaining how you have sex,” Matthew recalls. (“When you cry like that you sound like meat being tenderized by hand,” Michael’s poem “Ode” begins.) Ever since, through high school and college and beyond, the brothers have supported themselves with food-service jobs. Both have only recently moved back to Portland: Michael from Ann Arbor, where his girlfriend, Phoebe Nobles, had attended graduate school; Matthew from Hudson, New York, where he’d been living with a now ex-girlfriend.

  The Dickmans had gone to Cassidy’s to work on some poems. Each is the other’s first and best reader. “Because he’s my brother, and because of the relationship we have, he doesn’t feel that he is going to hurt my feelings,” Michael explained. “And he’s read all my stuff. He has a sense of trajectory.” Matthew said, “His fingerprints are all over my poems. And because we know each other’s work so much, and have seen it change so much, we can call each other out on something that might seem really great to someone else but is actually old hat.” Each is also the other’s most ardent advocate. “When I read his poems, there is nothing else I want to write but his poems,” Matthew said. “I think, What am I doing with my life? Michael’s poems have that strange, wonderful voice.” Michael, for his part, will not appear after Matthew at a poetry reading, “It would be like Cream following Jimi Hendrix,” he told me. “Reading Matthew is like listening to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers—wild, colorful, fast. And, if he says that reading mine is like listening to Arvo Pärt, punch him in the nose.”

  Over beers at the bar, Michael read aloud one of his new poems—spare, disconcerting lines suffused with a piteous sense of loss: “All my snowy friends / piled up inside my bedroom / extinct and smiling / packing ice beneath / my eyes.” Afterward, Matthew took the manuscript and began scribbling on the page. “ ‘All my snowy friends’—that’s so beautiful,” he said. “But this ‘I wanted to beat the shit out of everyone’—the word ‘shit,’ or ‘beating the shit,’ has too much resonance with other poems of yours.”

  They turned to a poem of Matthew’s, a barroom narrative describing a late-night encounter with a pretty, idiotic girl: “The woman sitting next to me calls herself Summer / and keeps touching her lips / and scratching her thigh / and ordering a martini / and talking about history.” Michael said, “ ‘The hem of her dress’—that’s sort of like the ‘beat the shit out of ’ in my poem. I was just reading this interview with Mark Strand, and he says you should be very suspect of clusters of words. If a cluster of words comes at you, it was probably written by someone else, and if it wasn’t written by someone else it was probably already written by you.”

  Michael stepped away to make a phone call, and a heavily pregnant waitress came by. “Excuse me, but are you guys twins?” she said, explaining that she was expecting twin boys in a few months. She was favoring the names Desmond and Davis. “Maybe—just to throw this out?—another two names that would be great are Michael and Matthew,” Matthew offered, with a twinkling smile.

  Michael and Matthew’s mother, Wendy Dickman, didn’t realize that she was carrying twins until she had a sonogram a week before she was due to give birth. Hysterical, she told her doctor that she was paying for only one birth and taking only one baby home. “Wendy, you only have to pay for one, but you have to take them both,” the doctor gently told her. The boys were born by Cesarean section, Michael two minutes before Matthew, on August 20, 1975. Wendy, who was twenty-nine and unmarried, had become pregnant during a brief relationship, and the boys’ father, Allen Hull, was already gone by the time she brought them home, although he did live nearby. (“I was born after a long night of Black Russians and Canasta,” Matthew writes in a poem called “Love.”) “It was difficult,” Wendy told me. “Matthew would be in the bassinet crying in the living room, Michael in the crib in the bedroom crying, and I would be on the front porch, crying.”

  The boys shared a made-up baby language until they were weaned off it, on the advice of their pediatrician, and maintained an unusual sympathy of experience. “If Michael had an ache in his left ear, Matthew had an ache in his left ear,” Wendy said. “If Michael had a cavity, Matthew had a cavity in the same spot. Once, Matthew was playing at the elementary school across the street, and Michael and I were in the house, and Michael started crying and saying, ‘I am hurt, Mommy.’ The school caretaker came across and told me that Matthew had been hurt playing on a jungle gym.” In later years, the brothers started calling each other by the same nickname, which they still use: Pig, which they adopted after reading “Lord of the Flies,” whose final chapter ends with Ralph recalling the “fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” Even so, the differences in their personalities started to emerge early: Michael was more analytical, whereas Matthew was more driven by emotions. Although they were born just two minutes apart, Michael, whose name Wendy had mulled over for months before his birth, was cast as the older sibling, especially in the eyes of Matthew, whose name she’d come up with at the last minute. “Michael was logical, sequential, and a little bolder,” Wendy said. “He would go down the slide, whereas Matthew would kind of look at the slide and assess, and, if his brother did a good job, he might try.”

  They lived in a small, low house, with a maple tree in the front yard and a dusty park a short walk away. Wendy and a female friend had bought it a couple of years before the boys were born, and the friend moved out when the boys were eighteen months old. (“We’d decided that whoever got married first would move out and the other would get to keep the house,” Wendy told me.) The boys’ half sister, Elizabeth, was born when they were four. (Now twenty-nine, she is studying for a master’s degree in social work.) Lents, which was originally a farming community that was annexed to Portland in 1912, was until the early seventies a blue-collar neighborhood of single-family homes, with its own commercial center and a distinct, small-town character. Things started to change in 1975, with the construction of Interstate 205: the freeway sliced the neighborhood in two, requiring the demolition of five hundred houses, and seeding strip joints and bars along Foster Avenue.

  As the boys grew older, Lents declined. There were drugs and gangs, including the Gypsy Jokers bikers, who had a clubhouse a couple of blocks from the Dickmans’ home. Asian immigrants began moving into the area in the nineties, and there was a concurrent rise in the skinhead population. In a poem called “For Ian Sullivan Upon Joining the South-Side White Pride,” Matthew writes, “What our neighborhood lacked in compassion / it made up for in baseball bats and chain link / fences. Asian mini-marts and your parents’ rage / swelling inside your chest like someone pumping / up a basketball.”

  Wendy Dickman told me, “I didn’t know the changes were going to happen. We had these wonderful neighbors, but I didn’t realize what was there if you went outside our block. I would drive to work, come back, and park my car in the driveway, and I rarely walked anywhere. The boys did a lot of walking, and they were exposed to things that I wasn’t.” The exposure wasn’t just in the streets; it was in the homes of their friends. In a poem called “Some of the Men,” Michael writes:

  Look at

  Josh’s father—

  Stumbling into the bedroom at three

  in the morning the two of us asleep

  and all that moonlight

  and beat his son’s

  head against

  the headboard

  “Humor should be employed to defuse tension, not create it.”

  You fucker you fucker you asked for it

  The moon

  His jaw splashed across the pillowcase.

  Wendy Dickman had spent much of her childhood in far more affluent circumstances. Her father had died when she was a young girl, and her mother had remarried a wealthier man, the vice-president of a steel company in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wendy moved with her mother from Portland. “The most valuable lesson I learned there was that money doesn’t really buy happiness or build character,” she told me. “Those were defining years in how I decided to raise my own family.” (“For a long time my grandfather / tried to kill anyone / who came near him / Wives / Daughters / Stepdaughters,” Michael writes in “Some of the Men.”)

  Wendy’s stepfather was also the father of Sharon Olds, the poet. During the Dickmans’ adolescence, Olds became an intermittent presence—although her books, in which she draws on her troubled relationship with her father, were off limits. “She wanted us to have our own experience of her father as our grandfather,” Matthew says. “I know the stories—that he was a fierce alcoholic who did cruel things to his kids and wives. But we also knew him as a sober man who taught us to swim, and magically made us peanut butter and lemonade.” Michael and Matthew have strived to avoid taking nepotistic advantage of their relation to Olds, and have preferred to conceal it—Michael told a professor at college of the connection only after his class was assigned a weeklong study of an Olds poem and he had to excuse himself, on the ground that it was about his grandfather. Both brothers grant, however, that having a poet in the family may have helped them think that a poet was something that one could become.

  Wendy did not want to ask her family for financial help, and patched together jobs—she worked in customer service for the telephone company, and wrote policies for an insurance firm, where she is still employed—as well as sometimes resorting to public assistance. “When I was out of money, we would play the ‘cupboard game’—looking in the cupboard and making dinner out of what we found,” Wendy says.

  At first, the boys were enrolled in the elementary school across the street from their house, but their mother withdrew them after they started to complain of stomach aches. “I went to speak to the principal, and as I was walking over there this little five-year-old boy outside the school looked at me and said, ‘Fuck you,’ ” Wendy says. “I looked at him and said, ‘Thank you, because you just helped me to make a decision.’ ” Thereafter, the brothers attended a succession of private Catholic schools from which their mother managed to wrestle scholarships. (Wendy was herself Episcopalian.) “We were fiercely picked on,” Matthew said. “We were weird; we were twins; we had these government-issue glasses; and our last name had the words ‘dick’ and ‘man’ in it. So we came home crying a lot of the time.”

  Although they went across town for school, they hung out in the neighborhood with a crowd of skateboarders whose homes were considerably less secure than their own. “My mom created a very safe place in what ended up being a fairly rough neighborhood,” Michael says. “Our friends loved to come over. There was food, even if at times it was bread and gravy and rice. No one was drunk out of their minds beating anybody.” Even so, the brothers’ antics were riskier than their mother knew at the time. They started drinking at twelve, and went to parties at which gang members shot off guns in the street outside. Still, they observed limits. “I always had the sense that, if Matthew or I were drunk, Wendy could deal with it, or, if we got kicked out of school for a week for having some acid, she could deal with it,” Michael says. “But there were some things—heroin, meth—there was no dealing with this.” Some of their friends were less restrained. In a poem called “Scary Parents,” Michael writes, “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.”

  Their own father, although mostly absent, did bequeath them one important legacy: an older half brother and half sister, to whose mother he had earlier been married. Darin Hull, who was six years the twins’ senior, often went to watch their baseball games, and he became an idolized figure, although he eventually developed drug and alcohol problems. He died of an overdose two years ago. (“My brother opened / thirteen Fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body / until it wasn’t his body anymore,” Matthew writes in a poem called “Trouble.”) Dana Huddleston, who was eleven years older than they were, became a frequent babysitter. “The bond between them is stronger than anything I have seen,” Huddleston says. “They used to wake up having the same nightmare. They would be yelling the same thing, both sitting up in bed crying.”

  “Dana and Darin were incredibly important,” Michael says. “They were the first people who explained to me that parents could be nuts sometimes, and you didn’t have to do everything that they wanted you to do as a result.”

  Sometimes their father would make an awkward appearance. “He would come by for birthdays and things, but it was usually a disaster,” Michael says. “The year we turned thirteen was a big deal,” Matthew says. “I remember he bought us alarm clocks, and took us to the zoo. At the time, we were skateboarders. My head was shaved, except for long bangs, and Michael’s hair looked like someone had literally put a bowl on his head and shaved all around it. So going to the zoo was kind of strange.” The last of the birthday outings, Matthew recalls, was when they were seventeen. “I had been doing coke all night, and I got home and found that we had to go and have lunch with our father,” he says. “It was a really strange lunch. He brought a couple of flyers about how he thought we should go in the military.” (The Dickmans’ father now lives in Sisters, a small town in central Oregon. They last saw him at Darin’s funeral.)

  The brothers’ more ill-advised adventures have entered their personal mythology, if not always their poetry, and when they took me for a walk around their old neighborhood—four years ago, their mother moved to a suburb north of Portland—they pointed out, with some embarrassment, the walls they had daubed with graffiti, the schoolyard where they had skateboarded, and the park where they had received a city-funded free lunch on summer afternoons. “It was over here where we shot off your friend’s .45,” Matthew said, as we walked past the worn grass of the playing fields.

  “I don’t think it was a .45—that would have sent me back, like, ten feet,” Michael replied. “It was a smaller handgun. Nobody got hurt. I remember that it was really scary. We weren’t, I think, very tough. We hated all that stuff. We were so happy to find books.”

  “And lucky,” Matthew said.
  “At this point, I’m just happy to still have a job.”

  In high school, the twins were “very confident, and very interesting for their age—there was a certain amount of maturity, or should I say sophistication,” Ernie Casciato, their English teacher, who became a mentor, says. They were also reliably bad students, and on one occasion they took advantage of the frequent confusion of their identities by splitting their subjects between them while preparing for their final exams, so that Michael took the history and biology tests twice, and Matthew sat for English twice.

  During those years, they started to write poems. “Michael had developed a crush on this girl, who gave him a book of Pablo Neruda poems,” Matthew recalls. “She was a junior and we were sophomores. I also met someone older than me, and she was reading Anne Sexton. We both wanted them to take their shirts off and kiss us, and we decided that if we wrote poems that might help us in our venture.” Michael says, “I got the Neruda book, ‘The Captain’s Verses,’ and I didn’t look at it for ages, and then I thought, I had better read this, because then I could talk to her about these poems. And I read them, and it was an unbelievable experience. I read it over and over, and I was in tears. I could not figure out what was happening. I had no idea that anyone could say things in this way.”

  They would bring their compositions to Casciato to read. “It was always about love,” he told me. “I would say, ‘You can write about something else once in a while—there’s flowers, and trees, and rivers. There are feelings that you have other than that.’ But that was the major stuff: love, and the pursuit thereof.” (When Casciato acquired his first computer, the brothers used their talents on his behalf, conducting a chat-room conversation with a woman who later became Casciato’s wife—as if they were dual, freckle-nosed Cyranos de Bergerac.) Casciato was also the school drama teacher, and in that department the twins excelled; their mother had put them in after-school acting classes before they turned ten. Casciato cast them in a school production of “Tartuffe”—Matthew was Tartuffe, Michael was Orgon—and they played Mechanicals in a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Portland’s “Shakespeare in the Parks.” “They had, for their age, very few inhibitions,” Casciato told me. “They fed off each other. They thought alike, they acted alike.”

  As teen-agers, they began loitering for hours at Powell’s Books, the vast emporium that has helped make Portland’s literary culture more highly developed than that of much larger American cities. They forged the habit, as yet unbroken, of deliberately misplacing volumes that they wanted to buy but couldn’t immediately afford, in the hope of retrieving them later. By the time they left high school, they were both obsessed with contemporary poetry: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, Philip Levine—also a twin—and Charles Bukowski. “Reading Bukowski was, like, ‘Wow, you can write about anything,’ ” Matthew said. “I didn’t identify with, but I recognized, the type of masculinity in those poems—the injured, desperate bravado.”

  After high school, Michael enrolled at Portland State University, where he studied creative writing and theatre; Matthew spent four years at Portland Community College, where he also did a lot of acting, before eventually graduating, in 2001, from the University of Oregon. They applied to creative-writing programs, and went to the only one that accepted both of them: the University of Texas at Austin. They continued to be involved in theatre, and in the mid-nineties they appeared in a small independent movie called “Anoosh of the Airwaves.” In it, they had to enact a fistfight. “There was a stunt guy there to plan it all out, and we said, ‘You know, we’ve done this before,’ ” Michael says. Afterward, they briefly signed up with a talent agency, in the hope of getting work in commercials.

  Some years later, they received a call from a casting director in Hollywood, Denise Chamian, who was looking for twin brothers to appear in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Minority Report.” Michael and Matthew were cast as the “pre-cogs”—identical twin brothers who are able to foresee crimes before they happen. “I was searching for twins all over the country, and we needed a very specific look, and they were perfect, look-wise,” Chamian told me. “They were very pale, and kind of unearthly looking—people who looked like they had not been out in the sun much in their life.” The roles were not particularly demanding artistically, though they were physically: the Dickmans were required to have their heads and eyebrows shaved and to lie, muttering, in a vat of warm water with their skulls wired up. “It was the best job for poetry ever,” Michael says. “Whenever we weren’t actually shooting, we would be in our trailers, reading Ted Hughes, and then we would leave and take cabs to bookstores and spend our per diem on poetry. On our days off, we would make coffee in one of our hotel rooms and write poetry all day.”

  Even with such unusual opportunities, it became clear to both brothers that acting would have to become secondary to writing. “To be an actor takes up a lot of the same stuff as if you were going to try to make writing, and I couldn’t figure out how to do both,” Michael says. “Poetry just occupied my thoughts more.” They submitted poems to journals, and applied for fellowships—often the same ones, which occasionally resulted in some uncomfortable competition, such as when Matthew was accepted to the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “He was going to go to Cape Cod and hang out for two months,” Michael recalls. “He had got this great news, and I kept waiting for my phone to ring—shouldn’t they call me now, like they just called him? And they weren’t going to call, and they didn’t. But our work is so different that if they gave it to him they weren’t going to give it to me: ‘Sorry, we don’t like your stupid, spooky, lots-of-white-space poems; we like his intense, celebratory thing.’ ” (Michael reapplied the next year, and got the fellowship that time around.)

  The Dickmans became assiduous about seeking out writing mentors, among them Dorianne Laux, whom they first met in the late nineties. “I was teaching at the University of Oregon, and they made a phone call and asked if they could come and take me to lunch and talk about the program,” she says. “We ended up spending hours talking about poetry. They were incredibly passionate about it.” The poet Joseph Millar, who is married to Laux, says, “They talked about poetry the way that young people used to speak about rock and roll, or surfing, or cars. The enthusiasm was not the intellectual enthusiasm of a professor or a critic. It is the enthusiasm of a practitioner.” One of Laux’s poems, “Savages,” was inspired by the way the brothers and a couple of their poet friends would sprawl in the stacks at Powell’s: “They buy poetry like gang members / buy guns—for aperture, caliber / heft and defense.” Later, Michael found another mentor in Denis Johnson, the poet and novelist, who taught him in a class at the University of Texas; he sometimes visits Johnson at his home in Idaho, where for fun they shoot at trees with semi-automatic rifles.
  “Look. They say sit, you sit. They say roll over, you roll over. Where’s the prob?”

  “To some extent, they are Artful Dodgers,” Major Jackson, who met the brothers while Matthew was at the University of Oregon, says of the Dickmans. “They know how to surround themselves with people who have enormous hearts and generosity and are enthusiastic about art and literature and music.” One of the more artful dodges in Matthew’s career happened at the age of eighteen, when he met Allen Ginsberg, who was appearing at Powell’s. “He is signing this pile of books, and he looks up at me and he says, ‘How’s your love life?’ ” Matthew recalls. Matthew fled in embarrassment, only to return a little later. “I went right up to him and I said, ‘I’m sorry, how’s your love life?’ And he sort of smiles and he says, ‘I’m really old; my love life is what it is.’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t promise you anything, but would you like to meet my twin brother?’ And of course this poor man says, ‘Yes, I would love to meet your twin brother.’ ” Ginsberg joined the brothers for tea, and the next evening took Matthew to dinner. “After dinner, I decided the game was sort of up, and I said, ‘I just want you to know that I am not going to sleep with you, but it’s early enough in the evening that if you want to find someone else I don’t mind leaving,’ ” Matthew recalls. “He laughed and said, ‘No, I am having a good time. Why don’t we just go to my hotel room and visit.’ So we went up to his hotel room, and he orders a gin-and-tonic for me, and I am sitting there smoking Export ‘A’ cigarettes and eating chocolates that have been left on his pillow, and he and I have this incredible conversation about poetry.”

  Eventually, Ginsberg said that it was time to go to sleep. “He wrote down his address in New York, and he gave me a couple of poems that he had been writing drafts of, and he sat down on his bed,” Matthew told me. “And I sat down on his bed next to him and just told him how wonderful it had been, and thanked him. And then I thought, This is ridiculous, and I turned in and kissed him, and we kissed for probably fifteen minutes. And it was so sweet and wonderful, like kissing a mushy orange.”

  In “Slow Dance,” a funny, romantic, erotic, and unreservedly sentimental poem of Matthew’s that has proved such a favorite at readings that he feels almost obliged to retire it—“I don’t want it to be my ‘Free Bird,’ ” he says—he describes the “slow dance of siblings”:

  Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,

  one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,

  and when he turns to dip me

  or I step on his foot because we are both leading,

  I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.

  Matthew told me he first realized that his brother’s mortality was separate from his own during a visit to a relative who was dying in the hospital, when the twins were about thirteen. A nurse came to draw blood, and Michael fainted, cracking his head on the tile floor; at the sight of his brother’s blood, Matthew fainted, too, though his fall was broken by a hospital chair. Matthew was sent home, but Michael was taken to the emergency room. “I remember being terrified that my brother wasn’t going to leave the hospital,” Matthew says. “But there was part of me that also thought, What would happen to me then?” He hopes that he dies before Michael, he told me: “As unloving as it is, I hope I go first, because I think otherwise I would go a little crazy.”

  Matthew’s work is full of tender images of his brother—“That great and mythic friend of mine, that lucky charm,” as he calls him in one poem—and articulates the seductive, mysterious suggestion that twins, through their origin, have special access to the experience of union. “It is a magical thing that they have, and that twins have,” Joseph Millar says. “There is a sort of archetypal, mystical quality about it. I am sure it has its drawbacks, but there is a bond between them which is deeper than words, and it is interesting that they have chosen an art form which is often trying to say the unsayable.” But if Matthew’s work evokes a love forged before the dawning of consciousness, and expresses a striving to replicate that merging in every subsequent encounter—with an erotic partner, or with entire populations—Michael’s speaks of the ultimate solitariness of the individual, twin or not. (“I’m not dead but I am / standing very still / in the backyard / staring up at the maple / thirty years ago / a tiny kid waiting on the ground / alone in heaven / in the world / in white sneakers,” Michael writes in a poem called “We Did Not Make Ourselves.”) Franz Wright, who is a friend and mentor of Michael’s, says, “What Michael is tapping into is what everyone secretly feels, which is that they are alien and apart, and have been since childhood. He does it in a way that is very understated, and very moving. He goes into that fear and loneliness and that alienation that originates in childhood, and comes back with comforting news from there.” Michael says, “It is amazing that Matthew can write about the two of us dancing at a party—I have never done that, and it has never interested me. The times that family members have come up in my poems, they have their beginnings in people I know, and hopefully it gets much stranger.” When I told Michael that Matthew had told me he hopes he dies first, Michael smiled affably and said, “Yeah, he’s an asshole.”

  Not long ago, the brothers were approached by Pablo Van Dijk, the publisher of Kunst Editions, in New York, with a proposal: that each would write a poem for the other about their birth, to be published together in a chapbook, of which only ninety-nine handmade copies would be produced. The poems that the brothers wrote are as unalike as twin poems can be. Matthew’s is crowded and rhapsodic, its run-on lines breathlessly merging mother and brother and brother. “Twins floating / in each other’s arms / inside her arms. My brother / is being born with me / and so / I have never been alone,” it reads. (“It’s a love poem—I can’t help it,” he told me.) Michael struggled to write his contribution to the book. After completing it, he told me, “It was hard to write it and have it be a piece of art, and not a love letter to Matthew, which is something so specific that I wouldn’t think it would have worth for other people to read.”

  Michael, too, has imagined their shared birth, but his poem is just thirteen lines long, each incantatory phrase suspended in white space, carefully set apart from the next, like an unborn child sealed in a bath of amniotic fluid. “The body unfolds and unfolds and makes / a human being,” he writes. “Everything I am not / is walking across the room towards me / and looks just like me.” Each brother had gone some way toward capturing the mystery that is every child’s birth; but together they had given expression to the peculiar, doubled mystery of their own. ♦

  Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”Read more »

• Oregon Home Magazine - http://www.oregonhomemagazine.com/profiles/item/441-my-place-matthew-dickman-all-american-poet

  My place: Matthew Dickman, all-American poet

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  Go home with Matthew Dickman, writer of poems and keeper of the world's meanest cat.
  2011OctNov_MatthewDickman
  Photo by Jon Jensen

  WHERE HE LIVES: One unit in a 1940s four-plex in Northeast Portland with “Ralph, the meanest cat in the world. I’m not kidding. The entire world,” where he writes poems for literary publications including The New Yorker and Tin House.

  WORDS’ WORTH: The main room has glass-fronted shelves of books, a desk littered with more books and, on the walls, broadsides, limited edition printed poems by some of his favorite poets. The room “is like a big song.”

  WIT MAN: A red vintage button-back loveseat is a castoff from a failed romance. Better a loveseat than a love child. “It doesn’t cry.”

  THE DESK: Friend and fellow poet Mike McGriff “had a lot of extras of giant things like Cadillac cars and desks,” so loaned Dickman one in 2001. “I think it looks like something that would be a on a ship.”

  ODDITIES: He wonders about the inner lives of polar bears, the beauty of hotel soaps, and the party incident behind a cryptic apology in a circa 1910 letter a friend found and framed for him, that now hangs in a writing nook. “It says, ‘I promise I’ll never try to speak French to you again.’ Doesn’t it make you wonder? What went on at that party?”

  LIGHT MOMENTS: Copper lamp and chess game timer are from poet Carl Adamshick. “Do I play? Well, I lose.” The two get together weekly for “pints and poems.”

  SHELF LIVES: Vintage cabinet was a garage sale score; newer ones were bargains picked-up while working at Kitchen Kaboodle. These days he pays the bills with poetry, book sales, writing workshops and tutoring aspiring poets. His book, All-American Poem, won 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

  2011OctNov_MatthewDickman2
  Photo by Jon Jensen

  POET AYES: He writes of hands held like “two terrible letters of introduction,” a slow dance that is “all kindness like children before they turn three” and displays on a shelf, like a rare treasure, a plain gray rock picked up years ago from the beach at Seaside.

  FAMILY TIES: On his desk sits a recent New York Times review of a book by his identical twin brother, poet Michael Dickman. The article mentions Matthew and refers to a poem about their older brother, Darin. “All three brothers in the same article.”

  FAMILY TIES TWO: Dickman grew up in the Lents neighborhood of Portland with his 98-year-old grandmother, mother, sister and her identical twin daughters, Eloise and Pearl, who now live in Vancouver, Wash. “Four generations of women under one roof.”

  WRITE ON: "I can't write on anything special — no handmade paper books tied with a leather strap — it's too precious. On regular paper, I have no responsibility.”

  BUY THE BOOK: All-American Poem was first printed in hardback in a limited run of 500 “because poetry never sells.” It won several prizes including a $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Those rare sold-out hardbacks now command $150-$400 online. The seventh printing of the paperback runs about $14, available at bookstores including Broadway Books and Powell’s. His second book, Maykovsky’s Revolver, comes out in spring 2012.

  LISTEN: Matthew Dickman reading Slow Dance at a Narrative Night event in 2008.

  READ MORE: Poet Dorianne Laux captures the rare relationship of the “poetry posse” consisting of Matthew Dickman, Michael Dickman, Mike McGriff and Carl Adamshick, in her lovely poem Savages in her book Facts About The Moon.

  READ MORE II: The New Yorker profiled the Dickman brothers in an article about twins entitled Couplets by Rebecca Mead.

• Medium - https://medium.com/@Powells/interview-with-matthew-dickman-for-powells-com-963b60951b9b

  Interview with Matthew Dickman for Powells.com

  By Jill Owens 2012

  Matthew Dickman is a very unusual creature: a famous poet, at least here in Portland. At his Powell’s reading on October 1, he drew over 200 people for a standing-room-only crowd. He’s a local — he grew up in Southeast Portland (as did his twin brother, Michael, who is also an award-winning poet) and is now the poetry editor for Tin House. Dickman’s first book, All American Poem, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. His new collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, is the winner of the May Sarton Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The collection centers around his older brother’s suicide and includes poems of grief and joy, elegies and celebrations. Tony Hoagland raves, “Dickman is big news…. His work will make you love poetry again.”

  Jill Owens: In the introduction to your first book, All American Poem, Tony Hoagland wrote, “We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.” Do you think that’s true of your work or other poets’ work, and if so, how does that play out exactly?

  Matthew Dickman: [Laughter] Is it true about me? I think that I try to say things that are on my mind. I think sometimes there are things on our minds that we aren’t aware of, and I think that the greater mind might be like our inner life. I don’t know how it works. I think of this quote I love talking about by the poet Larry Levis, where in a poem he talks about writing poetry. He says, “Out here I can say anything.” I’m not sure what Tony is saying except that he’s being really sweet about it, but I think that writing, or any art form, that’s the only time we get to be free, when we’re making it — at least here in the United States. There’s an opportunity to unleash the self and say what’s really on your mind. If you don’t, that’s just up to you, I guess.

  Jill: So this may or may not speak to that, but there are these lines in “Akhmatova”: “As I walked around / the shallow pools / feeling like I had done a good job being myself” which seemed to kind of sum up something in your poetry to me, the trying and failing and trying again, just to be oneself in the face of grief or even of joy.

  Dickman: Yes. I guess in that line or in general, maybe, I often feel bad about things I’ve done in my life or things I haven’t done. That poem is set in these shallow pools around the Oregon Coast, but sometimes, I feel like you get out in nature, and nature can illuminate the fact that you are a human being and can put things in perspective for you. It can help you feel pretty good about being you. Maybe the shit that you’re going through feels a little less heavy when you’re looking at an ocean. [Laughter]

  Jill: Or a sea anemone.

  Dickman: Or a sea anemone! It feels so much more amazing than me when I look at it and touch it. I think, with me, that’s there a lot, this being in the world and because you’re in the world, always failing at something and always hurting somebody, but then trying to be good and trying to be humane.

  Jill: You mentioned in an interview that in Mayakosky’s Revolver, you’re writing, in part, about the “shadow” — you call yourself out for some pretty mean acts, including in “Elegy to a Goldfish,” which is kind of a terrifying poem. How were you thinking about that in connection with empathy and honesty?

  Dickman: I think about the shadow. My understanding of it comes from this Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz. He encouraged poets to engage in their own shadows. In our own poetry, often the person who is writing the poem comes off looking pretty good in most of the poems. [Laughter]

  I’m my own hero in almost every single poem and certainly, especially, in my first book, All American Poem. That’s natural. We write, we make stuff, and we want people to like us. That’s just a natural instinct.

  Often an “I” in the poem, the narrator or speaker, is someone who gets out unscathed in the poem and is doing something brave. Or worse, he’ll climb this mountain showing the rest of us a truth we’ve been ignoring our whole lives.

  Milosz talks about wanting artists to engage not just the parts of them that are socially acceptable and that are palatable to other people, but the other parts of the self that are darker and scarier. We all have those parts. Whether you’re a painter, or a musician, or a poet, I think you can create some art that engages with that part of you. It’s a good thing to engage with, because we’re not just one type of person, of course.

  Jill: This is maybe the flip side of that, but there’s a line in the poem “Dark”: “I had forgotten how brave we are, how dark our lives can be.” I was talking to a friend of mine a couple weeks ago about how sometimes we should acknowledge each other more for just getting up in the morning and getting through the day, and all the things that have to be done day after day. I think that a lot of your poems celebrate that.

  Dickman: That we’re doing this right now, that you even got to work, or that I even got out to my grandmother’s house earlier today — it’s fucking insane that we were able to do that. Just within our own bodies, within our different parts of self, our subconscious, our conscious, our inner life, all of this working at the same time, and all of the brain and all your senses doing the most complicated circus act in the universe, to make you walk forward in a way that’s sane and makes sense in the world that you’re in.

  Then put on top of that everything that we have, all this technology we have. If you have to get on a freeway, all the different cars. Then in the cars, all the different other human beings with their different stuff. It’s amazing there aren’t pileups every day on I-5 or I-205.

  I think it’s more awe. Not so much a pat on the back like, We’re awesome, but for me, it’s like, Right! What we’re doing is actually really complicated, and very difficult. I feel like there’s some wonder in that. Of course, we use living to piss on each other [laughter], but there is, of course, equal amounts of great love and compassion and bravery from people.

  Jill: Mayakovsky’s Revolver centers around the connected poems about the death of your older brother, and those are some of the most startling and moving poems in the collection, I think. Was that written all at one time, or were you writing other poems while working on that?

  Dickman: Those poems that make up that central part were written all at the same time. I was lucky enough to be on a Lannan Foundation residency out in Marfa, Texas. I was given a home to live in, and I was given time and some money out in the middle of west Texas. The closest biggest city was Juarez, so we were out there. Marfa is a magical place.

  I went out there, and I wanted to write a long poem, a long elegy for my older brother. I had imagined maybe a book-length poem. I thought, OK, I want to write a 20-page poem. I got out there, and I tried to write a 20-page poem for the first four or five days, and I was really sucking at it. [Laughter] It wasn’t going anywhere, and I felt discouraged.

  Then I did this thing that my mentors, Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, two great poets, used to do. When my brother and I and our friends Carl and Mike would come visit them, we’d get up in the morning. We’d pick out five or six words, and we’d write for 20 minutes. The only rule was you’d have to include those words we picked out in your poem. Then we’d read them to each other. Some were really great first drafts, and some were crap.

  I just started doing that. I would get up every morning, and on a little yellow sticky pad I would just write five or six words that came to mind and then I would write a little poem. I did that, and I wrote probably 40 to 45 poems that month. Then I picked the ones I really liked and worked on those. I rewrote those, and eventually they became those 13 poems that are in the middle of the book.

  Jill: What were some of the words?

  Dickman: They were random. Some of them were just words that were around me like “cactus,” “donkey,” “dog.” I have them all at home. I have all of them saved for kindling. [Laughter]

  Jill: There’s also a lot of space imagery in this book, it seems to me. I was wondering how that imagery connected with the other subjects you were writing about.

  Dickman: The book was almost going to be called “Dear Space” because there is a poem in there called “Dear Space.” One of the connections for me, probably, is when I think about my older brother’s death or I think about other friends who have died either by accident or old age or disease or suicide, and when I think about the living, I understand both the dead and the living as much as I understand outer space, which is like zero. But I do know I have feelings about outer space. There’s something about the inconceivable immensity of outer space that reminds me of grieving over a dead friend or a dead relative. It also reminds me of love and of getting up in the morning. It freaks me out in a really great way that we’re made out of the same stuff that stars are made out of, and this table is too.

  It’s awesome that we’re separate because who knows what kind of crazy experience that would be if we weren’t. But everything seems to go together and then reach towards outer space for me. That’s a long rambling nonanswer to your question [laughter], but there is something about the wonder and the scariness and immeasurability of space that reminds me of our lives on earth. And so, I think space was coming up a lot.

  Maybe also because when the book was first started being written, I was in Marfa. There are no lights out there, so you’re covered in stars. So maybe that stuck with me, too.

  Jill: There’s also an inexhaustibility to the speaker’s want, in several poems in both books — in “On Earth, “ there’s the line “I want them all / and all the time,” which I thought might encapsulate that. In a strange way, I think that might explain some of your poetry’s appeal — it makes the reader want too, or want to want. Not all poetry does that, even some poetry I really love. Does that make sense?

  Dickman: I think so. I do want a lot of things and they change all the time. The other day, I was thinking about happiness and what it means to be happy and then I was listening to some people who are really, really smart talk about it. One person was asked, “What do you want?” And they said, “I want to not want anymore. That would be happiness.” Then there would be peace, or something. But I like the very American, kinetic, energetic, ecstatic want. [Laughter] I like that. It’s so much fun. I think that’s an OK place to be.

  Jill: I think so too. You mentioned in a couple of interviews that you took a break from writing for several months several years ago, when you were going to therapy. Did therapy affect the way you thought about poetry? It sounded like your writing changed a lot after that.

  Dickman: I don’t know if therapy affected my writing. The breakdown that I had, and then going to therapy, affected my writing in that I wasn’t writing and it lasted for months and months and months. When I went back to writing, what would happen, which I don’t fully understand, is that in a way I had forgotten or left behind some rules and stuff and was writing in a completely different way. But I don’t know if it was my therapy. At the time, the therapy I was in was basically therapy just to try to sleep and eat and figure out some other things. But I’m in therapy now, and as for writing, it’s become as interesting to me a part of my writing process as letter writing has been for so long.

  I write letters to a lot of people. I’m lucky to have some really wonderful older poets to write back and forth to. There’s an intimacy when you sit down to write a letter that’s different from an email or a text message, of course. Especially a handwritten one, although typing is also a physical act. But there’s a kind of intimacy. It’s not quite like going into a confessional box, but it feels close to that for me, being raised as an Episcopalian and going to Catholic school my whole life, because there’s a nice, sweet intimacy there. I feel like you figure certain things out and you wrestle with a part of yourself or part of your inner life that’s different from the rest of your day when you’re writing a letter.

  I feel like it’s the same with therapy. The kind of therapy that I do is talk therapy, and some of it is posttraumatic stress therapy. It’s a processing of the past that, in a way, maybe you’re doing as a poet too, when you sit down to write a poem. Even if you’re a language poet who is afraid of your own body and emotion. Even if you’re that, then you’re still processing your life when you sit down to make something. At least it’s coming out of your life in some way.

  I think it might boil down to just this, which is the one thing that therapy either back then or right now has done for me as a poet, is that it has urged me to be more honest with myself, and to engage in the work in a different way. Like, to be more excited about creating it and making it in the moment of making, and less manic about where am I going to send these poems out to get published and how’s that going to happen. Less of the career stuff, and more of how am I experiencing making it and does it feel good.

  Jill: There are a lot of movies and a lot of historical references in your poems. Are those frames that you use to think about the world fairly often?

  Dickman: I think they must be. Movies have been so important in my life. My memory is not that great, or at least that’s what I tell myself, so that probably makes my memory not so great. I’m not sure how that works. [Laughter] But I do know this. I don’t remember a lot of actors’ and actresses’ names, or sometimes I’ll forget the names of movies, but they’ve always meant a lot to me. I’ve felt very deeply about movies, particularly older films. My twin brother Michael and I have a mentor and father figure named Ernie Casciato, who’s a local Portland actor. He helped raise us from high school on and introduced us to old films. It really affected both our lives. There’s something about, I think, how I experience the world because of films that I’ve watched.

  Films, or even something like your Diet Pepsi bottle, might end up in a poem… [Laughter] [Ed. note: I was drinking water out of a Diet Pepsi bottle.] It looks very spacey, like something you would insert into a ship that might light up the ship. I would talk about a Diet Pepsi in a poem, or anything that’s around me. I think environment’s important.

  Jill: I really like that about your poems, and I would bet a lot of people do. There’s the large and the sacred, and then there are the Diet Pepsi bottles and Starbucks cups…

  Dickman: Yes, which are sacred in a different way. One thing that irritates me a little bit is when people use the word reference. They say, “You reference pop culture,” or, “Do you think it’s safe to reference pop culture?” Well, you’re a writer in the United States. Everything is safe. [Laughter] That is a Western problem.

  But I don’t like the word referencing. No one ever says to Mary Oliver, who’s a million times better poet than me, but no one ever says, like, “Oh, what’s the deal with referencing geese?” [Laughter]

  Jill: Or flowers.

  Dickman: No one ever says, “Hey, why are you referencing that bear? Are we going to have those bears 100 years from now? Isn’t it dangerous to reference it and date your poem with this bear?” I just don’t understand any of that. [Laughter]

  Jill: It might be less likely that there are bears around than Diet Pepsi.

  Dickman: That’s the sad thing. Pepsi’s going to be around longer than bears. Or, at least, more available. [Laughter]

  Jill: How is your project going, where you’re advocating for poetry by having people send a book of poems to someone who doesn’t read much poetry?

  Dickman: I think it’s OK. It was a quiet little thing. I mentioned it at a reading I gave at Powell’s on October 1st. Then I wrote about it for the Tin House blog. Some people have been tweeting at #shareapoem, and that’s been interesting seeing people’s tweets and what they’re buying and who they’re sending it to. I heard from a stranger who is buying something like 25 to 30 books of poems. She has a son who’s in the military, who’s in Afghanistan, and who is a reader. But she’s not sure if some of the people in his regiment read poems, so she’s sending them a bunch of books of poems to read.

  It’s great. Then there are stories like, “My sister-in-law is this wonderful scientist but doesn’t read poems. I’m going to send this book of poetry to her and see what happens.” I’m hoping to do more with it. The call, at least on the website of Tin House, was for the 30 days leading up to the election to try to create a grain of sand of empathy. That would have been awesome from this, I think.

  I’ve been talking to some small-press publishers and trying to maybe look at working out organizing a bigger event, or bigger push, for it. So, we’ll see.

  Jill: Do you know about World Book Night?

  Dickman: I don’t, no. What is it?

  Jill: It’s one night a year where people sign up to give books out to people who aren’t big readers. I think it’s gone on in the U.K. for a while, but last year was the first time it happened in the U.S. Publishers basically underwrite the costs of the books so they can be given away for free. They just announced the titles for next year, and there’s a Tin House title on the list, which is really cool. Your idea sounds kind of like a poetry version of that.

  Dickman: That’s so cool. Absolutely.

  It’s so crazy to me. There’s this weird cycle happening where people say, “Poetry doesn’t make money,” which is true. Not if we’re talking about the money that fiction makes.

  Jill: Even in that case, it’s a particular kind of fiction, though. A lot of fiction doesn’t make very much money.

  Dickman: Right, totally. Literature in general, compared to the NFL. [Laughter]

  Poetry doesn’t make any money, so there’s no money invested in poetry. The space goes to ads. Poetry doesn’t get out on the tables a lot when you walk into a bookstore, and it’s not promoted. But I think if something is not promoted, then how are people going to know about it? I think poetry needs a little bit of help because it was so mismanaged when we were younger.

  When we’re really young, it’s great. We have parents, often, who read poetry to us and poetry is this fun thing that is going on. Then we get into middle school and high school and poetry is sometimes wrecked for us. It’s mistaught. It’s taught as a puzzle. It’s taught as something like, You’re not going to understand this, but we’re going to painfully take the next hour to go through and explain it. Fiction is not taught that way. Also, why are you reading Carver in a high school class and the poetry equivalent is John Donne? That’s fucking crazy to me. For teenagers, with all the chemicals shooting off wildly inside their bodies… Raymond Carver or Lord of the Flies is great to read as fiction in high school because you can understand it. In high school, you want to fuck, fight, or die. Then you’ve got Donne or Keats or something, and then you’ve got some teacher who has to explain why it’s about sex, whereas they should just be reading an Anne Sexton poem.

  I feel like a lot of damage has been done to our experience of poetry by the time we are in our 30s. I feel like poetry needs some advocacy, and that’s partly what the project is about, is to get it out, because poetry is not confusing. I’m not very well educated. I was an undergrad for eight years. I never did very well in school — I’m not gloating about it, I wish that wasn’t true — but I think you can experience art without being overly educated.

  People do that all the time with music or dance or museums. People will go there and they’ll see some modern dance. They’ll see a painting and they’ll say, “Well, I don’t get it, but it feels good. I don’t get it, but it sounds amazing. I don’t know what’s in here, but it tastes awesome.” [Laughter]

  With poetry, they’re just like, “I don’t get it.” And then, that’s it. That’s where it stops. I just want to push for… You don’t have to be overly educated to understand poetry. You don’t have to understand it in a critical way. There’s a way you can understand poetry that’s emotionally credible.

  Also, what else is crazy to me with all this is that everyone who talks out loud is speaking poetry all day long, yet never reading it. Human beings have always interacted and tried to explain our experiences through metaphor and simile. People are saying lines just during their work week, to explain some feeling they’re having, that poets would die to have in a poem.

  So we’re engaged in poetry all the time. There’s just been this weird disconnect from it on the page.

  PoetrySuicideInterview

• Hunger Mountain - http://hungermtn.org/wonderland-of-words-an-interview-with-matthew-dickman/

  QUOTED: "My poems in my upcoming book, Wonderland, are not as rangy and wild as the poems in All-American Poem, but they still come from a place of unknowing. From sitting down and having a feeling, thinking about something in a vague way and then just typing."

  Interviews + Poetry
  Wonderland of Words: An Interview with Matthew Dickman
  Lara Gentchos
  March 21, 2017
  More and more, I want to write honest poems that share something about my thinking and my life. – Matthew Dickman

  The first time I encountered Matthew Dickman’s poetry was in spring 2016, during a reading of his work at VCFA’s Café Anna. He was reading from his fourth book of poetry, Wonderland (to be released this year). His poems were lyric and visual, sympathetic and matter-of-fact. I was struck by his ability to hold an introspective and reflective space around the objects, people, and events of his life, much of which was traumatic, if not tragic. Yet this space is neither judgmental nor sentimental. Instead, it allows for an appreciation of the human experience.

  Dickman is the author of three poetry collections — All-American Poem, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and 50 American Plays (co-written with his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman). He is also an editor for Tin House Magazine, a 2015 Guggenheim recipient, and a professor in VCFA’s Writing and Publishing MFA program.

  Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Dickman to discuss the evolution of his creative process, the relationship between art and life, and his thoughts on the ethereal elements that make some poems stand out from the rest.

  LG: What makes a text a poem for you, as opposed to an essay or piece of fiction?

  Dickman: One thing about the question, what is a poem, or what is poetry, is that it’s a question that often isn’t asked of short stories, fiction, or screenplays. I think it’s asked more frequently, or exclusively, of poetry because poetry is so deeply linked to our emotional lives.
  Poetry doesn’t come from storytelling. It comes from prayer. I think there’s something in our DNA as human beings that feels there’s something sacred about poems.

  LG: Do you mean that poetry comes from prayer through its literary heritage? Or do you mean we experience it as something sacred?

  Dickman: I understand it as both those things. I understand poems coming out of incantatory prayer and incantatory songs, but all poems share certain qualities — line breaks, stanzas. They utilize these things just like short stories might utilize characters or dialogue. So another answer is a poem is a poem.

  I also believe in conceptual thinking, so if someone was like, “this lamp is a poem”, I’d be like, “Solid, awesome. That’s a poem for you.” But for me, poetry has changed a lot from my early memories, being nine or ten years old to being 41 years old. The way I approach my art has changed, too.

  LG: How so?

  Dickman: For a long time, I wrote strictly narrative poems that didn’t really free associate or go anywhere wild. They were like tidy little boxes on the page. I wrote poems in one particular way: I would get an idea for a poem, or maybe I’d read something in the paper and it’d be about bees and honey and I’d think, “Okay, how am I going to write a poem called ‘The Bee Keeper’s Daughter’? It’s going to be a poem about the beekeeper’s family, this young woman being alone and being stung, and how it all relates to her dad.” I’d have all these ideas. I’d come up with the first line and how it would end. All of it was in my brain. I would sit down and type it out, and basically transcribe it from my mind. I wrote like that for a long time.

  Then when I was in grad school, after my first year there, that summer, there were a couple of major tragedies and I had kind of a psychic breakdown.

  LG: Were those personal tragedies?

  Dickman: Personal tragedies, yeah. A murder-suicide and then an illness-death. I just kind of lost it. I ended up in the hospital for about two days, and then I contacted the school and was like, “I need the next semester off for health reasons.” I started seeing a therapist every day, and I didn’t write poems for, like, eight months. I didn’t really even read poems. I just concentrated on being able to eat an orange every day.

  I felt disconnected from poetry, but I still wanted to get my degree. So, I went back to my MFA, and I thought, “Well, maybe I’m not going to be a poet anymore, but poetry will be part of my life. Maybe I’ll be an editor or run a poetry series.”

  But when I started going back to school, I had to write poems for these workshops to get credit for them. Something happened in that span of time of not writing or thinking about poems, of having to deal with tragedies that also set off memories of traumatic events in my childhood — having to work with all of that and be present with all of that. When I sat down to write a poem again, I seemingly forgot all the rules that were either given to me or that I had invented, for what a poem should be like for me. I started writing poems, like the ones you find in my first book, All-American Poem: free-associative narrative poems that kind of go all over the place.

  LG: That’s so interesting. Can you give me an example of how that changed?

  Dickman: Yeah. In my second book of poems, in Mayakovsky’s Revolver, there’s a poem called “Coffee.” And quite literally, I was like, “I gotta write a poem for workshop and I’m drinking coffee. God, I love coffee.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to write about coffee.” It was just like monkey-monkey [makes typing gesture with his hands]. My brain went all over the place. It didn’t really have to do with coffee, but it flowed all around. Instead of a box, a clean little machine of poetry, what I printed up was this rangy, free-associative narrative poem that was about coffee, but also about my older brother’s death, and Portland, and all these other things. And I was like, “That felt good.”

  I didn’t really remember how it felt to write poems before, but that felt good to me. So I was like, “Well, let’s keep going with this. What else do you like, Dickman? You like public parks.” So I wrote a poem about public parks. It was just like monkey-monkey, typee-typee. Thinking about parks and writing whatever. That continues to be the case.

  My poems in my upcoming book, Wonderland, are not as rangy and wild as the poems in All-American Poem, but they still come from a place of unknowing. From sitting down and having a feeling, thinking about something in a vague way and then just typing.

  I do remember that in the past when I would sit down and write a poem, it felt really comforting; it felt very secure to me, like “I’m doing this thing and it’s part of my identity. I’m a poet and I write poems.” But the more I write poetry, the more it doesn’t feel like that. It feels more urgent and also a little more untethered because I don’t know what I’m going to write about or say.

  LG: Do you mean untethered in a freeing and good way, or is there a stress to that not knowing?

  Dickman: There’s a bit of stress, a bit of anxiety to it.
  I don’t feel really free until I’ve been working on the poem a little. But when I first sit down, it’s like, “Is this going to happen? Am I going to be able to write a poem again?”

  LG: But I’d imagine that anxiety also contributes to that sense of urgency you mentioned. Can you tell me more about that? How does that urgency connect to typing like a monkey, and writing “whatever”?

  Dickman: It’s like I have a feeling, like a low-grade anxiety that I want to get this out of me. Then I start writing about the first thing that pops into my head, and I trust it.

  LG: So, it sounds like that feeling of urgency has become really important in your process, but I’m still curious about this word “whatever”. What makes a piece that’s a free-association of “whatever” worthy of the title ‘poem’? What makes it worthy of being published, as opposed to a big messy, random pile of “whatever”? Do you tap into those rules you abided by before?

  Dickman: A big issue is sincerely accepting the “whatever,” which is everything in your life, or everything in the world. Something I’ve been learning to be more and more in my writing is vulnerable. As an editor for Tin House Magazine, if it was between a super well-crafted poem and a vulnerable messy poem, I’d publish the vulnerable messy poem above the really well-made, maybe more emotionally conservative poem.
  I’m going to die, and I want my experiences, as much as I can control them — which is not much — to be experiences with art that makes me feel something.

  LG: Are you saying that vulnerability is key to the success of a poem?

  Dickman: Yeah. This is something that I’ve learned recently. Around 2012, I was reading new poems, and a friend of mine who’s also a mentor and a poet, was in the audience. Afterward, we went out for a beer. We sat down and I asked him, “What’d ya’ think? My new hot-shit poems, right?” He was like, “Yeah, they’re good.” I was like, “Right?” And then he was like, “I have a question.” And I was like, “Yeah, what is it? Do you have a question like how fuckin’ awesome am I?” And he said, “My question is, Matthew, when are you going to stop being the hero of all your poems?” And I was like, “What?”

  Then I went back and read all of my poems in my books, and I was like, “Fuuuck. I am the hero in all of my poems,” and I had a total epiphany. I was embarrassed. And I was like, “How can I write from the self, and about the self, and have it not be where I’m always the hero?”

  LG: If you were always the hero, does that mean that you were always writing from a particular voice? Were you always writing from the same narrator, as a form of protection around your topics?

  Dickman: Yeah, totally.

  LG: But it sounds like you’re comfortable with that vulnerability now? How did that happen?

  Dickman: I am now, yeah. But part of it, for me, has been seeing mentors of mine who are older who have been through a lot of crazy stuff, and who have worked really hard at being healthy. Seeing that they had no shame around things. It was a practice to both talk in public about certain things, things that could be thought of as either positive or negative, and also to write about those things — to the great chagrin of my mother and some other family members. There was an article in a big magazine that talked about a cocaine addiction that I had to deal with, and a bunch of other stuff. I was fine with it, but other people were like, what are you doing?

  But, I don’t know. More and more, I want to write honest poems that share something about my thinking and my life. That’s about all I want to do as far as poetry goes: to explore different versions of what that looks like in poems.

  For more of Matthew Dickman, check out last week’s Etc. column where you can listen to Matthew reading two new poems from his forthcoming poetry collection, titled “Wonderland.” These poems also appear in Hunger Mountain 21: Masked/Unmasked, available now.

• Fugue Journal - http://www.fuguejournal.com/matthew-dickman-interview/

  QUOTED: "While first working on the poems in Wonderland, I was also thinking about this question: why, if I am always changing—that is to say as I live and live through transformative experiences such as the suicide of my older brother or the recent birth of my son—do I continue to write, at least formally, in the same way? This seemed odd to me. So I began experimenting with stanzas and line breaks in a way I hadn't for years."

  dickman big.png

  B

  ased on my own experience, you should plan on having to buy a Matthew Dickman book multiple times—the first copy for yourself, and the next several, again, for yourself, after having repeatedly insisted fellow poets “borrow” them. Perhaps this is due in part to the unmistakable sincerity and human verve that not only pushes Dickman’s poetry down the page, but also reminds of poetry’s unique capacity for generosity—it's nearly impossible to feel alone while reading Matthew Dickman.

  Tony Hoagland raves that Dickman is the kind of poet “we turn loose … into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds,” and recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Matthew about what’s been on his mind—including his formal approach, the elasticity of The Self, punk rock, and his new book, Wonderland (forthcoming from W.W. Norton March 6th, 2018). And as you’ll see, his answers were just as generous and full of spirit as his poetry.

  COREY OGLESBY: Reading Wonderland the first time, I was most immediately struck by the stanza breaks—a device I couldn’t recall having seen much in your previous work. This changeup in form seems to me like just one of the ways this collection quickly announces a kind of overall stylistic departure. Was there something about this book that demanded a different approach?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: While first working on the poems in Wonderland, I was also thinking about this question: why, if I am always changing—that is to say as I live and live through transformative experiences such as the suicide of my older brother or the recent birth of my son—do I continue to write, at least formally, in the same way? This seemed odd to me. So I began experimenting with stanzas and line breaks in a way I hadn't for years. I was also helped through what felt like very important conversations with my twin brother, the poet Michael Dickman, at the time. These conversations revolved around the poems and their forms, but also felt like conversations about The Self and the elasticity of The Self. Isn't it true that The Self can be many things, can bend and change or should as you live your life? I believe so. And so should poems, the poems one writes.

  CO: Some formal elements throughout Wonderland seem to cast a kind of incantatory spell via repetition, like they’re working to conjure up the memory of a specific Self. Was there a particular Matthew Dickman you were trying to locate or give voice to?

  MD: I'm always trying to locate Matthew Dickman. That is to say, I feel like often I have lost who I am or I feel like I have never known who I am. I have felt it. I know I have felt it. And that is like everyone! The hour poems are just the evidence of an anxiety/mania-flushed 24 hours. The repeating lines that begin and end poems like "Astronaut" are about anxiety too. Like trying to say the thing but being too nervous. Or not knowing what the thing is, yet but needing to speak.

  CO: That “need to speak,” that urgency, is an energy I’ve always enjoyed so much in your work. There’s a rawness and speed that, even before this book, I’ve thought of as being kindred to punk music, which makes me wonder about the poems in Wonderland titled after punk bands like Circle Jerks and Bad Brains, and if you consider your poetics at all informed by punk, and if so, in what ways.

  MD: The first poets I ever heard were the singers in punk bands, though then I didn't think of them as poets. They gave language to the emotional and social life of my childhood. There is an influence, and that would be how straightforward those old punk songs were and how "daily" the subjects of the songs. The poems you reference I tend to think of as nature poems. When writing Wonderland, I had gotten to a point where I had a bunch of it done and looked around the landscape of the book and noticed there were all these poems about the people and experiences of the neighborhood, of my childhood, but no trees! No birds! I began to, as Jorie Graham puts it, "write into the corners" of the book, and it seemed important to talk about nature—the natural world of that place and time. But I couldn’t just write a "nature" poem—couldn’t just write about some crows, because the crows and trees and what have you only existed for me alongside or with "class." So the titles of those poems are a link between nature and class in my childhood.

  CO: I think those poems definitely do a great job of keeping the book’s central concerns afloat while simultaneously looking at them from different angles, which is something Wonderland does so well as a whole—there’s a focus that’s never lost. When you get to the point with a book like this where you’re “writing into the corners,” what other kinds of things are you looking for?

  MD: I suppose I'm looking to see if I'm leaving anything out, anything that seems important. So with Wonderland, that was the fact that there was nature—not just skateboards and skinheads—in my neighborhood. I'm also trying to be open enough to listen to the book and hopefully overhear what the book might be wanting. That sounds perhaps too general, but it's true that a book will often announce what it needs. When I was getting close to a finished manuscript with Mayakovsky's Revolver, the book told me it needed something more than death and elegy, so I ended up—at the zero hour—writing the last poem in the book, titled "On Earth," and that poem, I think, ended up anchoring the deaths and elegies. It completed the dream of death by ending the book with the living.

  CO: If the completion of a book's “dream” tends to occur to you later on, to what extent do you enter the book-making process with an idea already in mind of what that dream might be?

  MD: I enter the dream of the book the same way I enter the dream of writing a single poem: reaching out into the world, into my own inner-life, without knowing what I am reaching for or toward. This is a fancy way of saying that when I am making something, be it a poem or letter or essay or book, I have no idea what I am doing. I only learn what I am doing by making the thing.

  CO: Do you have any specific artists’ voices or presences (a writer friend of mine referred to them the other day as “Force Ghosts”...) who materialize in the room at any point during the writing process with helpful advice of some kind? Who are some of your sages?

  MD: A lot of my "Force Ghosts" still walk the earth: Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Mary Ruefle, Roger Reeves, the artists Jason Dodge and Douglas Gordon, the musician Geoff Rickly—friends and family who, in different ways, guide my humanity. But these are just some of the many souls that help keep my soul alive.

  CO: Assuming you yourself are a similar figure for other struggling poets, what advice would you give them?

  MD: My advice would be to try and be courageous when you can, to have a big and rich reading life, to expose yourself to things that on first glance may not seem to be something you would be interested in, to try and be brave enough to love even if you do not understand what or who it is you love, to have beliefs but also the ability to change your mind, to be kind to yourself, and finally, to avoid definition, even if it is you yourself that is dying to be defined.
  2 POEMS by Mathew Dickman

  MATTHEW DICKMAN is the author of two full length collections, All American Poem, which won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, and Mayakovsky's Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012); and co-author, with Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon, 2012), and Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016). He is also the author of four chapbooks: 24 Hours (Poor Claudia, Portland & onestar press, Paris, 2014), Wish You Were Here (Spork Press, 2013), Amigos (Q Ave. Press, 2007), and Something About a Black Scarf (Azul Press, 2008). His third book, Wonderland, will be released by Norton in 2018. Currently, Matthew teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program and writes advertisements for a living. He lives in Portland with his partner and two children.

• Paul Semel - http://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-wonderland-poems-author-matthew-dickman/

  QUOTED: "If I was to say these poems moved around, in and out of, a theme it would be a particular part of my childhood which has directly affected a particular part of my adulthood. But there was no clear decision made but for the one to collect all these poems together in a certain way. I’m not sure if one makes decisions about anxiety, wondering about the past and how it affects the present, or what ghosts come to visit at night."

  Exclusive Interview: Wonderland: Poems Author Matthew Dickman

  Like a lot of people who write poetry, Matthew Dickman is influenced by other poets. Not the least of which his twin brother and fellow writer Michael. But in talking to him about his newest collection, Wonderland (hardcover, Kindle), he revealed that he’s also influenced by a visual artist and two kinds of often rebellious music.

  Matthew Dickman Wonderland

  Photo Credit: ©️ Josh Tillinghast

  To start, how would you best describe the poems in Wonderland? Are they free verse about your feelings, sonnets about nature, what?

  I would say most of the poems in Wonderland are poems in which I am dreaming myself back to my youth, at a particular time, in a particular place. They could officially be called free verse, but many have form, forms which are organic to my own sense of music and anxiety.

  Why did you decide this would be a good theme on which to frame Wonderland?

  If I was to say these poems moved around, in and out of, a theme it would be a particular part of my childhood which has directly affected a particular part of my adulthood. But there was no clear decision made but for the one to collect all these poems together in a certain way. I’m not sure if one makes decisions about anxiety, wondering about the past and how it affects the present, or what ghosts come to visit at night. If they were chosen based on theme then that decision happened after realizing what I was doing and that I couldn’t go back. Well…that I didn’t want to go back.

  Some of the poems in Wonderland previously appeared in The New Yorker and American Poetry Review, while others were in your chapbooks 24 Hours and Something About A Black Scarf. But are the versions in Wonderland different from the previous versions?

  Most of the poems that were published before have been revised in Wonderland. I think of revision not as an “act” or a way to make a poem “better” but as a practice, one that is as much about writing as it is about understanding myself.

  Speaking of those chapbooks, does Wonderland have all of the poems that were in them?

  No because not all of them wanted to be in this book.

  Was there ever any thought to Wonderland being a compilation of your chapbooks? Or are you thinking that the rest of the poems from 24 Hours and Something About A Black Scarf, as well as the ones from your chapbooks Amigos and Wish You Were Here, will appear in later books?

  I haven’t thought of that. After a book is written — of which I don’t have a lot of experience — I have a hard time imagining I will ever be lucky enough to publish another book.

  Are there any writers, or poetry collections, that had a big influence on the poems in Wonderland, but not your earlier collections?

  When writing Wonderland, I went to so many poets, alive and dead, poets like Ai, D.A. Powell, Morgan Parker, Marie Howe, and Maged Zaher to name only five.

  How about other influences, such as song lyrics or visual art; did any of them have an influence on the poems in Wonderland?

  The work of the artist Jason Dodge has been wildly influential to me. And punk music. And rap. From Minor Threat to Young Thug.

  Back when I wrote poetry, I often did readings, which would sometimes prompt me to make changes in the poems I read. Do you do this as well?

  Totally! Sometimes when I read I accidently make changes, I fuck up a line, but the it sounds better to me or makes more sense and so I just trust the mistake because often a mistake I make is more honest than I am in the moment. This happened a lot with the incantatory “hour” poems [a series in Wonderland titled “One A.M.,” “Two A.M.,” and so on], a word here or there would change the whole world of the poem.

  Your brother, Michael, is also a poet, and has written such collections as Green Migraine and The End Of The West. Do you guys trade poems back and forth for feedback?

  All the poems I have ever written have his fingerprints on them. He is usually my first and last reader.

  Matthew Dickman Wonderland

  Finally, if someone enjoys the poems in Wonderland, which of your previous collections would you suggest they read next and why that one, and which of your brother’s collections would you recommend?

  I would say to work backwards. Go to Mayakovsky’s Revolver and then to All-American Poem. That way this potential reader will get to end with joy.

  As for Michael’s, I would tell anyone to read Green Migraine. It’s my favorite of his three books of poems, though I’ve already read a lot of the new book he’s working on and that book is going to be amazing.

  Exclusive Interview: Jazz Musicians Matthew Shipp And Mat Walerian
  Exclusive Interview: Jazz Musicians Matthew Shipp And Mat Walerian

  May 26, 2016

  In "Music"
  Matthew Shipp Trio Piano Song Review
  Matthew Shipp Trio Piano Song Review

  January 26, 2017

  In "Music"
  Exclusive Interview: Sonic Fiction Pianist Matthew Shipp & Saxophonist/Clarinetist Mat Walerian
  Exclusive Interview: Sonic Fiction Pianist Matthew Shipp & Saxophonist/Clarinetist Mat Walerian

  March 8, 2018

  In "Music"
  Books // Author Interviews, Books, Matthew Dickman, Matthew Dickman Amazon, Matthew Dickman Books, Matthew Dickman Brother, Matthew Dickman Interview, Matthew Dickman Kirkland, Matthew Dickman Love, Matthew Dickman Mayakovskys Revolver, Matthew Dickman Minimum Wage, Matthew Dickman Poems, Matthew Dickman Wikipedia, Matthew Dickman Wonderland, Matthew Dickman Wonderland Books, Matthew Dickman Wonderland Interview, Matthew Dickman Wonderland Poems, Matthew Dickman Wonderland Poems Interview, Michael Dickman, poems, poetry, reading, Wonderland, Wonderland Interview, Wonderland Poems, Wonderland Poems Interview // Leave a comment

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/matthew-dickman

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  Matthew Dickman
  b. 1975

  Image of the poet Matthew Dickman.
  Image of Matthew Dickman. Photo by Josh Tillinghast.

  The twin brother of poet Michael Dickman, poet Matthew Dickman grew up in Lents, a working-class area of Portland, Oregon. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and an MFA at the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center. He is the author of the poetry collections Wonderland (2018), Mayakovsky's Revolver (2014), 50 American Poems (cowritten with Michael Dickman, 2012), and All American Poem (2008).

  Unabashed in their celebration and in their grief, Dickman’s expansive, long-lined lyric poems are layered with references to popular culture, personal history, and class-based struggle. In a 2010 interview with Brian Brodeur for the blog How a Poem Happens, Dickman stated, “I do believe in inspiration. Inspiration and meaning-making. Often they are bed partners.” Introducing a selection of Dickman’s poetry in the Boston Review in 2007, poet Major Jackson observed, “He knows something about the sorrow of this world, its call for a kind of toughness of spirit and a sensitivity that must go underground if one is to survive and, more importantly here, the violence that such poverty [re-creates] and echoes in the lives of the dispossessed. His authority is that of the native, unwavering and resolute.”

  Dickman’s debut collection, All American Poem (2008), was chosen by Tony Hoagland for the American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize and also won the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. He has received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the American Academy of Arts and Science’s May Sarton Poetry Prize, as well as residencies and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Literary Arts of Oregon, and the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
  Poems by Matthew Dickman

  Bluebells
  Fiddlehead Ferns
  Lilac
  See All Poems by Matthew Dickman

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  Matthew Dickman
  Photo Credit: Josh Tillinghast
  Texts by this Poet:
  Six Poets, Six Questions: Matthew Dickman in Conversation
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  Born on August 20, 1975, in Portland, Oregon, Matthew Dickman was raised by his mother in the suburb of Lents. After studying at the University of Oregon, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center.

  Dickman’s first full-length collection, All-American Poem, won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Amigos (Q Ave. Press, 2007), and Something About a Black Scarf (Azul Press, 2008). His second full-length collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W. W. Norton), was published in 2012, and Wonderland (W. W. Norton) was published in 2018.

  Dickman’s style, as exemplified in All-American Poem, was noted in the Los Angeles Times:

  “Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love...The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara.”

  Dickman’s awards include the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, the 2009 Oregon Book Award, and two fellowships from Literary Arts of Oregon. He has also received residencies and fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, The Vermont Studio Center, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Lannan Foundation.

  In addition to writing, Dickman serves as poetry editor at large for Tin House magazine. He also appeared in the 2002 film Minority Report alongside his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Select Bibliography

  Wonderland (W. W. Norton, 2018)
  Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W. W. Norton, 2012)
  All-American Poem (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)
  by this poet
  poem
  Transubstantiation
  Matthew Dickman
  2018

  My mother is taking
  me to the store
  because it’s hot out and I’m sick and want a popsicle. All the other kids
  are at school sitting
  in rows of small desks, looking
  out the window.
  She is wearing one of those pantsuits

  with shoulder pads
  and carrying a

  2
  poem
  Maine Seafood Company
  Matthew Dickman
  2012

  (Salt)

  A LOBSTER.
  Once out of the box
  The wooden box
  The metal box
  The box, the box, the box
  Dragged up from the salt

  Things don’t feel too bad

  And then they do

  And then they don’t

  (And waves)

  poem
  Coffee
  Matthew Dickman
  2008

  The only precious thing I own, this little espresso
  cup. And in it a dark roast all the way
  from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia
  where coffee was born in the 9th century
  getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms
  cresting out of the

  first

  browse all 4 poems

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QUOTED: "A digressive, self-indulgent cleverness too eagerly upstages the poet's ostensibly serious subject matter."

Dickman, Matthew. Mayakovsky's
Revolver
Fred Muratori
Library Journal.
137.12 (July 1, 2012): p87+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Dickman, Matthew. Mayakovsky's Revolver. Norton. Oct. 2012. c.112p. ISBN 9780393081190. $25.95. POETRY
The follow-up to Dickman's 2008 debut, All-American Poem, is a tour de force of runaway grief and wanton introspection that attempts to navigate the thin line between despair and hilarity. Occasioned by a troubled brother's suicide ("his brain turned its armadas against him, wanting him to burn down/his cities and villages"), sprawling elegies plow headlong through the poet's cluttered, quasi-surreal memory bank no matter what may surface--childhood cruelty, guilt, regret--summoning a cast of spectral characters, such as the woman with "eyes/the color of hairspray, cloudy and sticky/and gone, but beautiful!" Dickman's knack for trap-door humor ("I wonder if the two of us knew/that I would grow up afraid of needles and the color white/ or that she would fall from a window"), pop social commentary ("To have two thousand/friends on Facebook you don't know/but stare at every night because you're lonely"), and screwball imagery ("the moon like the inside of a jawbreaker") are entertaining but wearing over the long haul. VERDICT A digressive, self-indulgent cleverness too eagerly upstages the poet's ostensibly serious subject matter, undermining what could have been an effective exploration of personal loss and redemption. --Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Muratori, Fred
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 4 6/3/18, 3:11 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Muratori, Fred. "Dickman, Matthew. Mayakovsky's Revolver." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 87+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858208 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d20a27cd. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A323858208

QUOTED: "Even jaded readers could be won over by the last, longest poem, in which Dickman pivots to the present."

2 of 4 6/3/18, 3:11 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Mayakovsky's Revolver
Publishers Weekly.
259.26 (June 25, 2012): p148. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Mayakovsky's Revolver
Matthew Dickman. Norton, $25.95 (112p) ISBN 978-0-393-08119-0
The central sequence of Dickman's raw, frightening, well-told second collection commemorates his deceased brother, remembering their shared delinquent years, their attraction to drink and prescription drugs, and the severe mental illness that disfigured his brother's adulthood. Around that 13-section elegy Dickman arranges other recollections of youth, lust, and strife, "my teenage mystery and finger, my skateboard and Circle Jerks album,/all those ghosts like birds-of- paradise/being lifted out of the dark." Death is for Dickman's late brother "your little love, your hot nipple-action/of fear, a train/in the dark before it breaks," while the tranquilizer Halcion once seemed to the poet a necessity of life: "I can feel you melt on my tongue like a naked girl wearing a diamond/crown, standing barefoot on a bed of ice." Dickman's jagged lines connect his own and his family's self-destructive impulses to the Russian modernism of Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself, and to other eminent modernists. Do not confuse the deceased brother, never named here, with Matthew's twin Michael, also an eminent poet. Even jaded readers could be won over by the last, longest poem, in which Dickman pivots to the present, listing persuasive reasons to live. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mayakovsky's Revolver." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2012, p. 148. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A294898131/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f4da5868. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A294898131

QUOTED: "In the end, very few of these poems possess that necessary supplement of poignancy.

3 of 4 6/3/18, 3:11 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Dickman, Matthew & Michael
Dickman. 50 American Plays
Stephen Morrow
Library Journal.
137.5 (Mar. 15, 2012): p114. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Dickman, Matthew & Michael Dickman. 50 American Plays. Copper Canyon. Mar. 2012. c.110p. ISBN 9781556593932. pap. $16. POETRY
This book by brothers Matthew (All-American Poem) and Michael Dickman (Flies) amounts to a series of one-off jokes with insufficient ballast. The template seems to be this: isolate a distinguishable characteristic of (or event that took place in) each U.S. state and try to say something funny about it. Take "Oh Oh Oh Ohio," for instance. Fred Astaire says "Only in Ohio," to which Ginger Rogers returns the stereotype-affirming reply, "Could you look so handsome!" In another poem, Baked Alaska wants to have sex with Alaska. Kenneth Koch is here, too, showing up in several states to stage Shakespeare plays. VERDICT Some readers might enjoy this book as a series of disconnected witticisms. There are, after all, several true comedic surprises that approach something like social criticism, as when, upon returning to Kansas, Dorothy says, "it's depressing as shit" or when Sacagawea, dying in Oregon, exuberantly exclaims, "I'm on a coin!" These moments are too rare, though, and ultimately not fresh enough. In the end, very few of these poems possess that necessary supplement of poignancy.--Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Chillicothe
Morrow, Stephen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morrow, Stephen. "Dickman, Matthew & Michael Dickman. 50 American Plays." Library
Journal, 15 Mar. 2012, p. 114. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A283705048/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2ab85467. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A283705048
4 of 4 6/3/18, 3:11 PM

Muratori, Fred. "Dickman, Matthew. Mayakovsky's Revolver." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 87+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858208/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d20a27cd. Accessed 3 June 2018. "Mayakovsky's Revolver." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2012, p. 148. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A294898131/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f4da5868. Accessed 3 June 2018. Morrow, Stephen. "Dickman, Matthew & Michael Dickman. 50 American Plays." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2012, p. 114. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A283705048/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2ab85467. Accessed 3 June 2018.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/19/brother-matthew-dickman-michael-dickman-interview
  Word count: 2331

  The only way I could really talk about his suicide was in a poem’
  By Alex Clark

  When their half-brother took a fatal overdose, twins Matthew and Michael Dickman wrote a series of poems in his honour. Now, the collection is breaking taboos about suicide and inviting comparisons with America’s great poets

  Sun 19 Jun 2016 02.30 EDT
  Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 20.01 EDT
  Dickman twins
  I’ve got your back: (from top) twins and poets Michael and Matthew Dickman. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

  If you go to interview twin poets about the death of their elder brother, and the work they have made jointly in response to it, your natural expectation is that the atmosphere will be serious, even sombre. And, indeed, my conversation with American writers Matthew and Michael Dickman, whose book revolves around the suicide, a decade ago, of their half-brother Darin Hull, frequently enters inevitably painful emotional territory, and the extent to which art is ever able to chart a course through it. But the morning that we spend together is punctuated with gusts of hilarity, irreverence, playfulness and informality, the alternating rainstorms and sunshine that flood the Bloomsbury streets outside an almost too neat pathetic fallacy.

  The laughs begin straight away, as we’re settling down, and Michael – the older of the 40-year-old twins by two minutes, and a shade more reserved than Matthew – is pouring us coffee. One brother – I forget which now, because they both do it – calls the other “Chancho”. What’s behind that nickname, I ask. Ah, they reply; yes, they’d better explain. “Since high school we’ve called each other pig,” says Michael, “and then versions of it in different languages, like cochon or chancho, or the diminutive in Spanish, chanchito.” “Also, piggy, or Mr Pig,” adds Matthew. “Or Piggums,” rounds off Michael. They also have pig tattoos on their arms.

  It emerges that “one of the only books we seem to have gotten through in high school” was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Piggy was the character with whom they identified. “Piggy is heavier set, with glasses, and he gets picked on,” explains Matthew, “and my brother and I went through a period of getting really picked on a lot in school.” But even more touchingly, Michael recalls the moment at the end of the book when the schoolboy Ralph “refers to the now deceased Piggy as his one true good friend. And that was always true of Matthew.”

  'We were raised without a father, so there's part of us that, through our older brother, got some of that energy'

  I’ve already apologised for talking about twin stuff the minute I arrived – how to tell them apart, etc. They’re used to it, they say, graciously. But now I point out that their affinity with Lord of the Flies is interesting: after all, before it descends into savagery, the novel delivers a version of the fantasy that all children have, of a sudden and decisive release from adult control, and the emergence of a world in which they can make their own rules. It is a mirror of the way people often view twins – bound together in a space of their own, and at some level immune to the demands of others. Is that a cliche?
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  “It certainly happened with us,” replies Michael, remembering the private language they had as toddlers (a paediatrician told their mother to put a stop to it). “There was never a question that we would have someone to play with, or who we would sit with in the cafeteria. Not that we didn’t have those terrible lonely moments for children growing up – but we at least had each other.”

  Did they feel like that within their own family, too?

  “Still!” laughs Matthew. “If all the family members get together for Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving, Michael and I – every time – will sequester ourselves in the kitchen, saying ‘Oh, we’ll cook for everybody because we love cooking’. We do love cooking, but just to get away from everything and have protection. And as the evening goes on, and people are in the living room drinking wine and suffering, once in a while they’ll come in to the kitchen and say, ‘Do you guys need any help?’ in this desperate way, you know, ‘Will you please save me?’”
  Dickman twins fighting
  ‘We have this sense of humour we’ve been working on since childhood…’ Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

  What do they need protection from?

  Michael: “Very little, actually.”

  Matthew: “It’s way more self-indulgent – it’s more like we just want to hang out.”

  Michael: “And you know, we have this sense of humour that we’ve been working on since childhood, which isn’t always shared with everyone at a family get-together.”

  Hiding in the kitchen notwithstanding, their family ties are evident in Brother, a selection of poems from their previous books, collected here for the first time. The book – a “tête-bêche”, or “head-to-tail” edition, in which each poet’s work occupies a part of the book, which is printed upside down in relation to the other’s – is dedicated to their elder sister, Dana. Eleven years older than Michael and Matthew, she and Darin, who was born in 1968, were the children of Allen Hull, who some years later conceived the twins during a brief relationship with their mother, Wendy Dickman. He lived nearby, in Portland, Oregon, but never as part of their family; Wendy went on to have another daughter, Elizabeth, with a new partner.

  As their half-brother, the twins tell me, Darin exerted an immense influence on them. Describing the first time he wrote about Darin’s death from an overdose, in the poem “Trouble”, Matthew explains: “The only way I could really talk about his suicide was by including him in this poem that is basically a long list of famous people who killed themselves. Because Darin was such a famous person in my mind and my heart.”

  'The subject of suicide, at least in the US, is still one that there's a lot of shame around… people keep it quiet'

  Trouble, which appeared in Matthew’s debut collection, All-American Poem (2008), also appears in Brother, and in the middle of a chronicle of the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Sarah Kane and John Berryman come these lines:

  “My brother opened / thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body / until it wasn’t his body any more.”

  Elsewhere, in the poem Coffee, part of a sequence entitled Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral, Matthew writes:

  “Once, I had a brother / who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke / his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment / before his brain turned its armadas against him”.

  I ask them why Darin felt so “famous” to them. “We were raised without a father, and so I think there’s part of us that, through our older brother, got some of that energy,” says Matthew. “He would make you feel very special in his company. He was someone who had this really big, empathic heart – for years, he worked with troubled youth in different programmes. So he was, in our minds, always beloved, and complicated.”

  “And he and Dana were just so cool,” chips in Michael. “Listening to the Cure, and smoking clove cigarettes.” Darin, who shared the twins’ love of skateboarding, took them from the “nice, family” supply stores to somewhere called Rebel Skates – edgy, sketchy, downtown. He and Dana added British bands such as Cocteau Twins and Joy Division to their playlists of punk and west coast rap.

  Darin’s death came after problems with drugs and alcohol, but Brother is not coy about the manner of his death. “You know that our older brother killed himself: it’s not hidden,” Matthew says. “And it’s not really even hidden in our poems. And that’s something that I’m excited about with this book, because I think that the subject of suicide, at least in the States, is still one that there’s a lot of shame around, a lot of complicated feelings around; people keep it quiet.”

  The poems themselves didn’t come for a long time. Neither of them, as Matthew puts it, “are poets who believe you experience something and you immediately need to write about it, or it needs to be a poem at all”.

  While Matthew’s poetry has an expansive, free-associative, narrative style, Michael’s tends towards the spartan and oblique, appearing to portray an interior world under immense pressure, and it came as a result of a series of dreams he had in the immediate aftermath of Darin’s death. “About a week after he died, and for about a month or so, every night I had an intense dream about flies. This is very unusual for me. The dreams that I remember tend to be very boring: I’ll have a dream that I’m at a coffee shop, and I’ve ordered a coffee. End of dream.” Now, though, his nights were studded with human-sized “Hollywood flies”, or rooms packed with flies he had somehow to get through. Sometimes Darin appeared in them – “it was very exciting to have a sense of him, his physical body next to mine” – and then, abruptly, they stopped altogether. But their “residue” persisted, and eventually Michael began to write about them, conceding now that the dreams “might have just been a way to trick myself into addressing the subject matter in a poem”. The result is stunning, unnerving, disturbing. “At the end of one of the billion light years of loneliness”, the poem False Start begins, “My mother sits on the floor of her new kitchen carefully feeding the flies from her fingertips”.
  The brothers give a reading of their work, at Emory University.

  It was Matthew Hollis, poet, award-winning biographer and poetry editor at Faber and Faber, who thought the Dickmans’ poems about their brother would work as a single volume, and, he told me, “connect far more widely than poetry sometimes does”. A long-term fan of their work, he sees in Matthew’s “long, rolling lines” the influences of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, and in Michael’s shorter, more European-inflected work echoes of Wallace Stevens. But what united them, he was sure, was this deep, personal investment in describing their family’s loss.

  The Dickmans discuss their work, and their lives, so openly and warmly that you can momentarily forget how painful it must be. How does it feel to them, to be sitting here, talking about it? “I’m very proud of this work,” says Michael, “and of this book in particular. And I also wish it never existed. So that is a strange position to be in.” Matthew agrees: “I would guess anyone who’s written about the death of a beloved would give up that book and any other book that they would ever write again just to hang out with them again.”

  They’ve told me about the plays they wrote jointly, one for each of the 50 states of America (plus Puerto Rico and Guam), which began life as a scramble to help Michael finish a grad school class project that he’d left until the last minute. “I love that you call it a project!” laughs Matthew. What would he call it? “A scam!” They’ve also told me how once, when Matthew was in a college play, Michael went to watch. At the interval, Michael went to the toilet, as did the play’s director, who began to berate him for his poor performance.

  Now, though, I want to ask them about the starriest experience of their careers. How did they come by their roles – as the ghostly “pre-cogs” – in Steven Spielberg’s futuristic Minority Report? They immediately pull my leg. Michael: “No one has ever asked us that.” Matthew: “It’s so weird.” I express astonishment. Michael: “I’m kidding.” OK, but how? They’re not quite sure how it came together, but after being involved in high-school and college theatre, they were briefly signed to an agency. In the first audition, they sat in fold-out chairs and shook. For the callback, they were told that Spielberg really liked their look, and “that a lot of the twins they had auditioned were really beautiful models, really handsome, like surf gods”, says Matthew.

  Michael adds: “‘Spielberg loved how vacant your faces looked.’”

  They roar.

  Matthew: “‘Like nothing was happening inside your heads.’”

  Michael: “‘Slightly weird-looking idiots!’”

  They got the parts, and loved working with Spielberg, who treated them with great kindness, they say. As a thank you, they bought him a first edition of the poetry of Jewish-German Nobel prize winner Nelly Sachs, whose work the director had put on the cast and crew’s reading list during the making of Schindler’s List. Now, Spielberg asked Minority Report’s star, Samantha Morton, to hold the book, and read a poem at random to herself during the film’s closing scene, a fact that pleases them inordinately. The Dickman brothers: getting poetry into the most unexpected of places, with double piggy power.

  Brother by Matthew and Michael Dickman is published by Faber, £10.99
  Topics

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  features

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2012/11/50-american-plays-by-matthew-and-michael-dickman/
  Word count: 865

  QUOTED: "The book doesn’t take itself too seriously, although its best moments occur when it does take itself seriously, and the end result is a mostly fun, loose romp through wild territory."

  “50 American Plays” by Matthew and Michael Dickman

  Reviewed By David Peak

  November 7th, 2012

  I’ve visited exactly half of the states that make up our federal constitutional republic. I’m counting states that I’ve lived in, vacationed in, or merely driven through. Some of the states on my list are among the most beautiful places I’ve been to in the world, while others are remembered as blights better left forgotten. The point is that this country of ours contains an immense variety of environments, cultures and qualities of life. So much so that I can’t even begin to fathom what I have yet to see. That’s an exciting thought: knowing that I live in a country where, on any given weekend, I can pack a bag, hop in the car or on a train, and arrive at previously unknown sights.

  Matthew and Michael Dickman’s 50 American Plays does an admirable job of capturing some of that excitement: excitement of exploration, of wonder. The poems that make up this collection are formatted as tight, typically page-long plays. They are heavy on personification and symbolism, surreal effect and humor. Stage instructions, if they are given at all, are limited to a handful of words. The title is slightly misleading, however, as there are actually 52 pieces in the collection—the brothers Dickman included both Guam and Puerto Rico. They are organized alphabetically. American entertainment icons such as Duke Ellington, Walt Disney, Bruce Springsteen, and Judy Garland make appearances.

  The book doesn’t take itself too seriously, although its best moments occur when it does take itself seriously, and the end result is a mostly fun, loose romp through wild territory. But I can’t help but wonder why. Why format these poems as plays?

  Reading the acknowledgements page at the beginning of the book, I learned that six years ago, a staged reading of 50 American Plays was hosted by Provincetown Theater. I have absolutely no way of judging how well this staging went, but much like the collection I’m reviewing here, I’m guessing it was hit-or-miss.

  Some of these poems are lovely in their own right. Take, for example, “People Retire to Arizona for Lots of Reasons.” The stage directions are given as “Sunsets and deserts.” A clipped exchange between “An Old Man” and “An Old Woman” reveals a poem of great beauty and precision, where the silvery image of swinging golf clubs take on the delicate form of an angel’s wings. Then there’s the poem “The Coldest Weather in Indiana,” which includes the following lines, recited by “Snow:”

  Draped like lace
  Between the fencepost
  And the sky
  I spend all my time
  Thinking of
  Disappearing
  Thinking of water
  Of churches
  And drowning

  This is some powerful stuff—poems that dig deep and immediate into the very soul of a
  state’s “character,” or the imagery that powers deeply embedded stereotypes, an understanding of qualities on a general level.

  The problem is that a fair percentage of the poems that make up 50 American Plays come off as exercises in cleverness. These are often the shortest poems in the collection, so they’re easily forgiven, but still, they feel phoned-in and self-satisfied.

  Here’s the entirety of “Missing You in Missouri:”

  (A train station).

  ME.

  I miss you

  (A train passes by).

  It’s worth mentioning that Kenneth Koch seems to travel through the states in this collection as a sort of guiding meta-spirit, always in connection with the shadow of Hamlet. Here he is directing the play in Hawaii (“You don’t see your father/You/Feel your father”), playing Ophelia in Iowa, designing sets in Minnesota, portraying the tortured prince himself in Nevada. The reason for these appearances stems from one of the two epigraphs opening the collection, written by Koch’s great contemporary, John Ashbery: “In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery is the best part.” It’s no surprise then that some of the strongest pieces in 50 American Plays are the most inconspicuous, lamentations from A Bus Stop or A Closed Door.

  The second epigram comes from the final lines of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “The Evening Land.” “’These States!’ as Whitman said, whatever he meant.” As frustrating, sad and silly as some of these hybrid play-poems may be, the brothers Dickman have dared to pick up where Whitman left off, exploring inside that confounding exclamation. What we’re left with as readers is at least as ugly and surprising as the country that serves as so much inspiration.

  David Peak's most recent book is The River Through the Trees. His blog is davidpeak.blogspot.com. He lives in Chicago. More from this author →

• The Minotaurs Spotlight
  http://minotaursspotlight.com/matthew-dickmans-all-american-poem/
  Word count: 1226

  QUOTED: "All-American Poem handles its namesake well. It feels ambitious, yet realistic and appropriate, casting a huge net considering it’s only being thrown by a single poet."

  Minotaur's Spotlight
  Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem

  We’ve been writing and reading about America since America was America. It’s one of the biggest anomalies of modern history: simultaneously the birthplace of modern democracy and modern oppression, the image of freedom and imprisonment, and the greatest example of wild beauty and materialistic clutter. Writing about America is as old as apple pie and small pox in blankets.

  America. What a place.

  In a way, this is what always made reading people’s work regarding America so interesting to me. It isn’t simply a matter of “Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung” like Emerson said so many years ago. Writing about America is about somehow collecting and organizing all the beauty and ugliness the world’s biggest experiment ferociously produces.

  In the book All-American Poem, it’s Portland based poet Matthew Dickman’s turn to take a long hard look at America. What’s first apparent is that Dickman doesn’t attempt to point an accusatory finger to offending American archetypes or swoon over the plains of the Midwest. Dickman’s portrait of America is slow and steady, quiet with observation. There’s no attempt at objectivity here. This is America seen through no other lens than the lenses of Dickman’s own eyes. And, frankly, that’s refreshing. While the tradition of ra-ra-this-is-f***ing-America-MAN poetry certainly has its place in the greater golem that is American poetry, this lighter approach feels like it has multiple entry and exit points for the reader.

  Much of the poetry in All-American Poem seem to pay respect to the immensity of dealing with a subject such as America. Sometimes Dickman seems irreverent, collecting of stream-of-consciousness-like details where we start somewhere and end up someplace miles away, but it all feels appropriate here in that each piece is a dialogue with an American living in America. Americana dialogues with contemporary America, the American subject (Dickman) dialogues with both and himself seamlessly. The effect is a cascading portrait of America past and present, intimate and general. In “Country Music”, Dickman likens a lover to a country song “playing underneath an Egyptian cotton sheet, the easy kindness/ of her body finding its way into mine.” In just a few more lines, Dickman then evokes the image of carrying groceries home in a public radio tote bag, dating an Indonesian hippie with dreadlocks, and skater kids smoking pot out of a Pepsi can (how’s that for some meta-American commentary?). Dickman gracefully sings the nostalgic and the contemporary as one chorus.

  Besides the work that is outward looking, there’s plenty of pieces that look inward as well. While these might not directly contribute to Dickman’s portrait of America, they work here. On their own, they are what you might expect from many collections of poetry: personal accounts of emotional strife, awe, and jubilation. But in the text they are fine examples of that but also serve the function of bringing attention back in on the individual (American), reminding the reader that America is massive, but made up of individual lives loving, lusting, grieving, thinking, and running through the motions at all times simultaneously.

  All-American Poem handles its namesake well. It feels ambitious, yet realistic and appropriate, casting a huge net considering it’s only being thrown by a single poet.

  I am tempted here to dictate the book’s titular poem, but an excerpt seems inappropriate here. It’s like taking a horse pill in the best way possible. Here’s the poem “Byron Loves Me” to get you started:

  My dead English professor sits at the foot

  of my bed, crying.

  What’s the matter? I ask.

  Matthew, he says, I will never understand Byron.

  My wife is married to another man, my daughter is in love

  with pop songs about sex

  and money, while Byron offers nothing

  but Seville and oranges. I can’t tell if he loves

  me or not. My professor shrugs

  like all dead men

  shrug, stands up and walks out

  of my room like all men, dead or alive, slowly

  with his head bent to the task of leaving. Waking up

  in the early morning, half dressed

  for a dream about ballroom dancing – my coattails fluttering

  in long black strips behind me, top hat

  pulled down over my eyes

  and half-dressed for breakfast – my pajama bottoms

  covered with flickering hotel signs,

  I remember that I live alone.

  And because I live alone

  I take the palm trees far too seriously, depend

  far too much on my books

  lined up like a third grade class preparing for recess,

  all wearing different coats, some

  pushing and pulling at their classmates. If you live

  alone with a smile

  thin as a paper cut, your dead English professor coming

  around every other night in tears,

  an empty mailbox and a neighbor

  that puts her cigarettes out in your begonia

  You should not hang yourself.

  Tell the palm tree you love him. Light a candle

  And offer yourself up to the books.

  Haven’t they saved your life once before? Reading

  Allen Ginsberg the day your friend cut himself open

  in the backseat of his car,

  the engine running while his mother

  was getting high off a plastic bag

  of paint thinner, a bluish ring around her mouth.

  You could have been in that car. You could have

  been like her

  but you sat on the floor and pulled Lucille Clifton

  off the shelf instead.

  As if that were not enough

  to make you shiver

  while the angel of fate passed you over, somewhere

  in New Jersey

  you have Bruce Springsteen

  writing songs about you and wondering how you are.

  Matthew Dickman’s book, All-American Dream, was published in 2008 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by the American Poetry Review. It is the winner of the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. All poetry was quoted with written permission of the author. Image courtesy of Amazon.com. Original cover art by Max Breslow.

  [author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://minotaursspotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/seanthumb2.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Sean Kearney is a native of Northeastern Pennsylvania currently residing in Philadelphia’s neighborhood of Fishtown. He received his MFA from Arcadia University with a focus in Poetry in 2013. Sean is currently floats between occupations such as dairy clerk, freelance journalist, open mic host, kinda-essayist, and one-off mascot gigs. His hobbies include playing music, playing with cats, etc.[/author_info] [/author]

• New Haven Review
  http://www.newhavenreview.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/all-american-poem
  Word count: 829

  All-American Poem
  January 26, 2009
  Reviews
  By Matthew Dickman (American Poetry Review, 2008)

  I first encountered Matthew Dickman’s “Trouble” in a recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s a litany of the many ways famous people killed themselves. Marilyn Monroe took sleeping pills. Marlon Brando’s daughter hanged herself. Bing Crosby’s sons “shot themselves out of the music industry forever.” The list’s utilitarian feeling only makes the horror more horrible, especially when it includes the suicide of Dickman’s brother: He “opened thirteen Fentanyl patches,” Dickman tells us, “and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore.”

  But there’s a sense of humor too, even whiffs of whimsy, which make the tenor of All-American Poem, in which “Trouble” appears, feel genuine without being sappy. The poems are lucid and coy, rambling and drunk, playful and gregarious, a tapestry of emotion with a notable thread missing: There’s little in the way of satire or irony, by which I mean meanness of spirit. Written amid the anxieties and neuroses of the Bush era, Dickman’s poems are conspicuous for their lack of bitterness. After learning about his brother’s fate, we learn: “I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears.” How random. How charming.

  And how frightening, too. For “Trouble” also recalls Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which suffering consumes those experiencing it while the rest of us appear cruel without meaning to. For the tortured, nothing else matters but the torturer, even as his “horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Life goes on despite that tiny shudder that comes from knowing that as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is in pain.

  But where Auden seems intent on forcing on us the aloofness of the cosmos, Dickman’s “Trouble” levels a cool eye while making a little room by the fire. His might be called gallows humor, but somehow it’s never macabre. It’s intimate and warm, friendly and firm. A tragic view of the world, but maybe also optimism in disguise.

  In the introduction to All-American Poem, Tony Hoagland rightly calls the book the “epitome of the pleasure principle,” and there are lusty, earthy poems contained within, stuffed with images, metaphors, and jokes that delight more than instruct. But they also affirm an old-fashioned sentiment that right now seems to be much in need in America right now. I’m talking about the human spirit.

  There’s a line in Richard Greenberg’s 2003 play, The Violet Hour, in which a flamboyant clerk riffs on the word “gay.” It’s 1919, way before the word took on its present meaning, so “to be gay is not to be frivolous,” he says proudly. “To be gay is to be light-hearted in the face of every kind of darkness.”

  Toughness with a smile. But Dickman isn’t afraid of darkness. In “V,” the world’s “been talking sleazy to all of us and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb that makes me want to wear a cock ring in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.” The speaker wants to flirt with a girl, but reconsiders. Maybe she wants to be treated as a human being, not an animal at the meat market: “And maybe this is not a giant leap into the science of compassion, but it’s something.”

  Happiness can be an act of will as much as an accident of fate. It’d be natural to let the light die behind your eyes in the wake of losing a brother, or your house. But to be “gay”—and in Dickman’s case, to be funny and charming and witty—is almost an act of rebellion. To be “gay” in the world of All-American Poem is be totally punk rock.

  Though there’s no sign Dickman sees it that way: He breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O’Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times. Especially Koch, who saw no reason why poetry couldn’t be fun. The first line of Dickman’s “Chick Corea Is Alive and Well!” is “Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.” And the last line isn’t afraid to flirt with sentimentality, because it’s a sensibility rooted in the here and now, and it feels right: The jazz pianist is like “a man whose been raised from the dead, looking down at a woman’s knees after years in the dirt, singing yeaahh! yeaahh! This is what I’m talking about, yeaahh! This good, sweet life!”

  John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.

  Tagged: All-American Poem, Celebrities, Matthew Dickman, Suicides, The New Yorker, Trouble, W- H- Auden

• The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities
  http://www.ralphmag.org/IJ/all-american-poem.html
  Word count: 996

  QUOTED: "This is one of those rare books of blank verse you can pick up and read as if it were a novel ... perhaps it is a novel, with no plot, really, outside of simple joy; but still an on-the-road epic, filled with casual by-passing images made in heaven, choice lines to hang on the refrigerator (or the clothes-line)."

  Matthew Dickman
  (American Poetry Review)
  We could "get hitched in Nevada. Just you, me, and Elvis." We could also "sell cheese curd in Wisconsin." Or go to Wyoming "getting drunk, shooting cans, peeing on the electric fence."

  How about running off to LA, where "you don't get to be lonely."

  You can 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 with a wool blanket / and put me to bed." And Iowa?

  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.

  § § §

  This Dickman is something else again: he's Whitman and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Gertrude Stein and Charles Bukowski and Billy Collins and e. e. cummings all rolled into one ... and by my troth is he fun. This is one of those rare books of blank verse you can pick up and read as if it were a novel ... perhaps it is a novel, with no plot, really, outside of simple joy; but still an on-the-road epic, filled with casual by-passing images made in heaven, choice lines to hang on the refrigerator (or the clothes-line), take to the beach,

  Some days a kitchen can
  save your life.

  Or, watching "An Imaginary French Film,"

  Ah Paris when it's raining
  and dark and I'm having popcorn in the dark,
  watching the march of subtitles make their way across the shoulders
  and breasts of actors from Lyons and actresses from Marseilles.

  Or the memories of growing up in Lents, Oregon:

  On the weekend our furious mothers
  applied their lipstick
  that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds
  and our fathers quietly did whatever
  fathers do
  when trying to keep the dogs of sorrow
  from tearing them limb from limb.

  "Dogs of sorrow." Dickman is the master of the run-on pouring out like the 4th of July evening sky tearing sizzlers and firebombs, symbols and metaphors careening together in a frenzied spicing of our world, our past blended with chance and astonishing turns: "At night my hat disappears / And then my scarf, gloves, my watch with the time inside it / bravely marching forward."

  It's the last three words that do it, screwing a commonplace into a complex and mythic poetic view, images turning turtle to give a clarity of vision to the universe, this man and his perverse world of a myriad different states of mind clamped together, a fix on the present collected with a wry yesterday, Dickman conveying not only the strange fix we've gotten ourselves into but listening to a symphony, where he is able to transform the sound into a vision,

  It's the kind of music to make love to
  with a shy woman who works all day at the public library,
  her breasts roaring like the two lions outside...
  It's what I imagine astronauts are listening to
  inside their helmets
  while they watch a new planet begin to spin
  and then another and another like notes from a cello until the night sky
  looks like an aquarium.

  § § §

  The thirty outsized poems here can reach inside of us to build a funny world of funny people doing and seeing funny things with a sense that is so pure we can see it as the American dream, taking the commonplace and elevating it in jazz riffs to turn the simple into an elegant but beautiful vision.

  I can't tell you how strangely romantic the Atlantic becomes when the sky
  is dumping snow into it.

  It is the task of a poet to take things that don't belong together and wrap them up in the same blanket and as you read it you nod your head and know that it is right and good and proper. Dickman can take snow falling in the black Atlantic, transform it into "seeing, for the first time / a naked body."

  Even though you know her name. You have even played a part
  in making her naked, but now she is something
  altogether different.

  This isn't show-off stuff, a poetic version of name-dropping. It is, rather, the right stuff: marrying things that should perhaps have been wed all along.

  Pat McGuiness writes that during the anarchist attacks in Paris in 1894, Stéphane Mallarmé expressed disgust. "Only one person had the right to be an anarchist: me, the poet, because I alone produce something that society doesn't want, in exchange for which it gives me nothing to live on." Dickman is just such a figure: giving us not only what we should want, but, at the same time, demanding nothing in exchange.

  --- A. W. Allworthy

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  reading
  from this book

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• Front Porch Journal
  http://www.frontporchjournal.com/issue80_review_dickman.asp
  Word count: 990

  All-American Poem

  Matthew Dickman, All-American Poem
  Publisher: American Poetry Review/Copper Canyon Press
  2008, 83 pages, paperback, $14

  all-american poem, Matthew Dickman's first collection, is as American as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Women's Suffrage. It is also as American as Pepsi-Cola, companies that manufacture toilet seats, and the ubiquitous Barnes & Noble parking lot. To comment on American culture today, as All-American Poem seems to do, is to concede to the conflict between American history and a current atmosphere of perceived consumption and pettiness. What stands out in this winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize is that the speaker is thoroughly aware of the irreconcilable conflicts of "being American."

  Matthew Dickman writes prose poems that, like the poems of David Kirby, can be mind-bendingly long and make Incredible-Hulkian leaps in logic. While Kirby maintains a southern aesthetic, Dickman does not confine his subject matter or mindset to a particular region. Dickman's poems inhabit much of America: California; Michigan; Massachusetts; Oregon; the Broken Spoke in Austin, Texas. The trampish atmosphere is best represented in the title poem, in which the speaker name-drops states of the union over eight pages as if they were friends and colleagues mentioned in an album's liner notes:

  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

  These are "American" poems for their word play and leaping associations, but to read "American" as "provincial" is a misnomer. They are provincial in the sense that they embrace the vast American landscape, but they are in the same turn repulsed by it.

  The poems are inhabited by an "I" speaker and include cameos by Warren Beatty, the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Santa Claus, Jesus, and (of course) Elvis, who the speaker's mother watches on television "move across the screen like something / even sex dreamed of having." But it's not just the self-awareness of the first-person speaker, the cast of characters or the litany of geographical references that make these poems authoritatively "American." Dickman's poetry is also conversant and idiomatic; it has no use or desire for stanza breaks; its conceits are accessible and humorous. At times, Dickman seems a poet wandering through language and logic, a fashionista sifting through a closet littered with clothes and shoes and accessories, trying to find the right getup for Saturday night.

  And it is in this wandering that the reader finds a conflicted "Americanness," in these long-lined, far-reaching poems that at times look messy and lack symmetry on the page--poems that are full of "things and stuff." In a book that is nearly an inch wider than most slim volumes, even its physical properties seem to embrace American maximalism. In "We Are Not Temples" the speaker is certainly aware of this conflict, and unafraid to invoke self-repulsion:

  As far as delusions go
  it must be the ones I have about kindness,
  that I am never mean or have never wanted to disgrace
  your wife in the coat room of a community theater.
  Or that I would always give up my seat
  on the bus for the elderly woman who grumbles
  about how much she hates Mexicans,
  that I move so that others can be more free,
  that my body is a temple,
  a kind of Taj Mahal or Mall of America

  These poems are about class and race and suicides, but they're also about sex and parties and cigarettes. It is in this conflict that the reader must at times question the sincerity of the speaker. As poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth warned us decades ago, the line that separates the "disengagement of the creator" and the "utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster," is a thin and dangerous one. It has become fashionable to point out how a young poet is not straddling this border between disengagement and nihilism. A poet is groundbreaking if he is detached from the detachment of the Hipster Youth, a population of writers too ironic and disillusioned to feel anything, too focused on self-celebration and word play to look either inside or out of themselves. In the introduction to All-American Poem, Tony Hoagland proclaims Dickman to be this young, fresh, hip-but-not-too-hip-to-be-sincere sort of poet. But one would think dealing with the subject matter and emotional territory Dickman explores requires a certain degree of detachment to be effective, to not come off distilled of emotion or sincerity.

  The cover photo, "Pope Crowds" by Max Breslow, also illustrates this conflict of detachment and sincerity. It is an overhead view of a faceless horde of onlookers waiting to catch a glimpse of Pope Benedict XVI, during his first visit to the United States. An aerial photograph of an American crowd waiting to see a foreign cleric is an interesting reflection of the duality of American pride, and its wanting to be liked by the outside world. The speaker in All-American Poem is one who belongs, one who is wholly--if not wholesomely--American, but is also one who wants to embrace the biting, skeptical voice of an outsider or an expatriate. The problem is, Dickman is neither.

  -Jared Walls

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/matthew-dickman-keeps-it-together-on-mayakovskys-revolver/
  Word count: 3158

  Matthew Dickman Keeps it Together: On "Mayakovsky’s Revolver"

  By Jeremy Butman

  MAY 23, 2013

  AS MOST WRITERS DO, the poet Matthew Dickman spent the first years of his career laboring on works that garnered limited attention in select circles. However, after the publication of his first full-length collection, All-American Poem (2008), Dickman underwent a swift and most unusual rise to national acclaim. The work received an array of awards, including the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Inevitably, it also spawned a backlash: he was dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan, a vapid grunge prophet, or worse. In his second collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Dickman puts such criticisms to rest and confirms his position as one of America’s most influential young poets. The book demonstrates a marked departure from his earlier efforts. It reveals the depth of Dickman’s moral imagination and insists on his commitment to developing his distinctive voice and thematic range. Mayakovsky’s Revolver is that rare work that lays bear how poetry struggles both with life and with itself.

  In general Dickman is a rare sort of poet, the type to spark in his reader a fascination for the author himself. One might muse on how a conversation with Yeats might go, or wish to send Robert Lowell some cheerful gift by mail, but what would one sacrifice for an afternoon of walking with Whitman, just listening to him point things out, or to light both ends of one’s candle with Edna St. Vincent Millay? Dickman’s poems seem to grasp you by the wrist, or around the waist and guide you to a vantage point where the world looks a little more hopeful.

  This is especially true of his first book, All-American Poem, which brims over with joy, with strength, and frustration of all variety. It is the kind of book you need your friends to read. Here is an excerpt from one of the poems of that collection, “Slow Dance,” which gained early attention, and so many requests at readings that Dickman once joked it was in peril of becoming his “Free Bird”:

  More than putting another man on the moon,
  more than a new year’s resolution of yoghurt and yoga,
  we need the opportunity to dance
  with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
  between the couch and dining room table, at the end
  of the party, while the person we love has gone
  to bring the car around
  because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
  if any part of us got wet.

  Here’s another example of that collection, this one from “American Standard”:

  Standing beside the toilet
  I have talked friends down
  from bad acid trips, and once,
  while flossing my teeth, experienced
  a deep sorrow lost in the mirror.
  All in the bathroom!

  A final taste of this sampling plate, now from “All-American Poem,” the titular work, which is the longest and most ambitious and accomplished of the collection:

  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.

  One could go on and on like this. What fun there is in Dickman! What trouble and misery! There is enough sex and humor and beauty in these pages to make one swell with the ecstasy of existence.

  Yet, however natural the charm of Dickman’s work, his poems are anything but naïve. His easy style may seem to look back at history with no more than an indifferent glance, but this insouciance is won through careful study: one of Dickman’s magic tricks is pulling off the pose of footloose amateur while simultaneously engaging in a professional dialogue with the poetic tradition.

  Indeed, Dickman’s engagement with his poetic inheritance is canny and obsessive. Though in the pitch of his voice and for his generosity of spirit he is a clear descendant of Whitman, he reserves his most vigorous interrogations for the legacy of the so-called New York School, especially the figures of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. In his earlier work, the tics and preoccupations of these poets are adopted by Dickman almost whole cloth. At times in All-American Poem, Dickman seems to write not like, or in reference to Koch or O’Hara, but as them.

  Cheap imitations of great art are one thing (namely cheap), but great imitations of great art often augur the birth of a new mode within the form — to name just the first couple examples that come to mind (and not necessarily to make the comparison) consider Bob Dylan mugging as Woody Guthrie on his first record, or the near scandalous similarity between David Foster Wallace’s first novel and Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49.

  Dickman’s “All-American Poem” is an example of such great imitation. In structure, content and in its style down to punctuation and tone, the poem bears a startling resemblance to Koch’s “A Poem of the Forty-Eight States,” written in 1969. In that work Koch extols and mocks the States as he mulls over the anxieties and pleasures of living in their Union — just as Dickman does in his own piece. Koch writes: “Indiana! It is so beautiful to have tar in it!” Dickman: “Kansas! My yellow brick road of intelligent design!” Like any great imitation, though, Dickman does more than just adopt and breathe new life into the style of his predecessors. He also tests the boundaries of the form and pushes beyond them.

  Koch and O’Hara made waves by turning against what they saw as the stuffy academic verse of poets like Eliot, and by embracing instead a poetry of the everyday: work that was personal, playful, and temporally marked by references to popular culture. Dickman continues this gesture, but also radicalizes and subverts it.

  One way Dickman achieves this is by highlighting his relationship to the poetic tradition, and by, in a sense, pulling back the curtain to reveal the machinery of his engineering a position within that tradition. In 50 American Plays (Poems), which Dickman co-authored with his twin brother Michael, who is also a talented poet, the Dickmans almost aggressively call out Kenneth Koch as an influence. Some deal of the drama and poetry consists in their negotiating a relationship with the older writer. Six of the “plays” have Koch’s name in their title, and as a comedic tribute to the Oedipal drive the Dickmans feel toward him as both desired mother and father-to-kill, in each Koch is cast in a different role in a production of Hamlet.

  The poem “Kenneth Koch plays Gertrude in Texas” reads:

  (Koch as Gertrude is tied to the back of a pickup truck)

  Koch.
  What are you doing?

  Hamlet.
  Scaring you.

  And from “Kenneth Koch Directs Hamlet in Hawaii”:

  Koch.
  You don’t see your father
  You
  Feel your father

  In another subversive move, by reproducing and reworking Koch and O’Hara’s concerns within in his own poetry, and by including both of them within his own system of references, Dickman effectively historicizes the intentions of the New York school, thus bringing them back into the tradition they fought to escape — in a sense academicizing the anti-academic. By so insistently acknowledging his debt to certain progenitors, he is at once paying that debt back and also refusing it: he is not, as Koch and O’Hara did, abandoning his predecessors, but rather antagonistically clinging to them.

  And Dickman does not merely reference their names, but actually incorporates their poetry into his own, as his own. This gesture not only radicalizes the notion of referencing the popular, but is also decisively contemporary: reminiscent of sampling in hip-hop and aligned with the 21st-century penchant for appropriation and repurposing. If it no longer seems possible to effect a true break from history, the comparably avant-garde position in the current era might be to take responsibility for one’s own inevitable historicization: to be less a revolutionary artist and more a curator of one’s revolutionary tendencies. Dickman comes after the great leveling of art in the 1960s, and he has developed the cheerful sheen of the anarchic archivist: everything is up for grabs; everything’s free.

  For all this, the title of Dickman’s most recent volume, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, laden as it is with historical import, is a point of intrigue. The Russian/Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a favorite of both O’Hara and Koch. Like them, Mayakovsky had a sly humor, an impatience for the metaphysical, and one can feel a similar impetuous thirst for experience in his long work “A Cloud in Trousers,” where he writes:

  In love, I shall gamble again,
  The arch of my brows ablaze.
  What of it!

  Making the line of descent almost too neat from this foreign antecedent, this Whitman in a dark mirror, is the fact that one of Mayakovsky’s final works was a portrait of the United States, a travelogue called My Discovery of America, which diagnoses the ills of the land while extolling it as a beacon of the future.

  Although he was an early and staunch supporter of the Russian revolution and the Soviet government, Mayakovsky became disenchanted with the regime after the rise of Stalin. While working as a writer of propaganda, Mayakovsky shot and killed himself.

  What is the meaning of the weapon used in the suicide of a poet? Dickman’s collection offers ample evidence that he has worked through his preoccupations with the New York school and has propelled himself some distance into new poetic territories. Does Dickman’s book somehow represent this revolver, or stand as an alternative or surrogate for the weapon? If so, what, if anything, is Mayakovsky’s Revolver aimed at?

  It is certain that, in naming the book, Dickman had O’Hara’s stanzas about Mayakovsky in mind, one of which reads:

  Now I am quietly waiting for
  the catastrophe of my personality
  to seem beautiful again,
  and interesting, and modern.

  The mess of life, so vividly celebrated in All-American Poem, becomes more onerous in Mayakovsky’s Revolver. In this work, death and suffering, and what to make of them, are central, and Dickman explores them at a depth that marks an expansion of his typical subject matter. If he has moved away from the New York school, one can see him entering a more equitable dialogue with poets such as Marie Howe, Tony Hoagland, or even Emily Dickinson. The work is at once more severe and more compassionate.

  This growth is accompanied by a matured style, as well. One reflection of this is that the book has a significant structure, broken as it is under five headings: “In Heaven,” “One: Dear Space,” “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of his Funeral,” “Two: Elegy to a Goldfish,” and “On Earth,” suggesting either a progression from heaven to earth, or, more likely, the ascension from earth, after death, through space to heaven, as seen in reverse.

  The structure is useful to codify the way the work as a whole revolves around the dominant topic of Mayakovsky’s Revolver: the suicidal behavior and fatal overdose of Dickman’s older brother. His death is mentioned briefly in All-American Poem. There, in a poem called “Trouble,” Dickman lists a number of untimely, tragic suicides, including that of his sibling: “My brother opened / thirteen Fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore.” The poem concludes with a means of resistance to the suicidal desire:

  In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
  my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
  I want to be good to myself.

  It seems that Dickman’s interest in the quotidian is much more than a reaction against the academic sterility of the early 20th century poetic form, as it was for the New York school. It is instead a means of staving off despair, and of combating suicide.

  This fight, which seemed a relatively easy one in “Trouble,” is considerably more pronounced in Mayakovsky’s Revolver. In “Bridge,” a poem that is emblematic of this collection’s shift in tone, Dickman presents the possibility of suicide as a real choice. He writes of traversing a bridge, and contemplates leaning over it, imagining how a person could “fall into the water below, and breathe in, and turn down, and be / gone.” Being aware of this possibility, as he writes it, is a positive, however:

  My favorite bridge. My favorite part
  of the walk home. This choice
  I think I have.

  It is important to have the choice. This thought reemerges in a later poem in the collection, “Dog,” in which he writes:

  I’ve written the word Choose
  on a piece of paper and taped it to a knife. Then I peeled it off
  and taped it to a book about Yesenin.

  Yesenin was a Russian poet executed for suspicions of plotting to assassinate Stalin — an interesting counterpoint to Mayakovsky. It is possible to read the collection in full as an assessment of why making the right decisions in these cases is difficult, but ultimately worthwhile.

  One obstacle to choosing well that rears its head in this second volume is that carnal pleasures, once so comforting and motivating, now appear shadowed by something discorporate. Though sex and material joys are still heralded in Mayakovsky, the entire physical world is haunted by what has passed out of it.

  An excerpt from “My Brother’s Grave,” in “Notes Passed to My Brother,” reads:

  Outside the graveyard
  there is still some part of him
  buried in the mysticism of his DNA, smeared across a doorknob
  or brushed along the jagged edge of his car keys. Two kids
  from the high school nearby
  will fuck each other on top of him
  and I won’t know how to stop them.

  When the messiness of life no longer seems ecstatic, the catastrophe of one’s personality no longer beautiful, and the earth is a form of boring afterlife, one may be tempted to buy the revolver that killed the poet Mayakovsky. Dickman, however, would still prefer to sell it. In “Mayakovsky’s Revolver,” the titular poem, he writes,

  […] Online
  someone is claiming to own Mayakovsky’s revolver
  which they will sell for only fifty thousand dollars. Why didn’t I
  think of that? Remove the socks from my dead brother’s feet
  and trade them in for a small bit
  of change, a ticket to a movie, something
  with a receipt, proof I was busy living,
  that I didn’t stay in all night weeping,
  that I didn’t stay up
  drawing a gun over and over
  with black marker, that I didn’t cut
  out the best one, or stand
  in front of the mirror, pulling the paper trigger until it tore away.

  Selling Mayakovsky’s Revolver, the best paper representation of the weapon, is another manner of resistance to suicide, a way of choosing well — of choosing life. The book does not aim to kill a tradition, nor does it represent the desire for passage out of this world. Both the weapon and the book are just things of the world, a world to whose vicissitudes and fragility Dickman has steeled himself. There is no more, or very little, carefree delight here, but there remains the hard-won variety.

  In the last section of the book, “On Earth,” Dickman delivers his familiar affection for these things of the world. As though making good on an early promise, he once again gives up to celebration, albeit of a simpler, more temperate kind:

  […] Oh to be on earth.
  To walk barefoot on the cold stone
  and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot
  on the cold tile in the kitchen
  where you kissed yesterday, to be standing in a bookstore
  and smell the old paper and glue
  […]
  […] On earth
  survival is built out of luck and treatment centers
  or slow like a planet being born, before
  there was anyone to survive,
  the gases of the big bang just settling, or it’s built
  like a skyscraper, by hand, some workmen
  falling, and some safe on the scaffold, up above the earth,
  unwrapping the sandwiches they have been waiting all day to eat.

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a further step in a poetic lineage; but more important, it is a meaningful response to the greatest difficulties of being human. Though we are haunted, still what fun it is to brush one’s teeth, what fun to get dressed up. Despite it all, what pleasure there is in being alive, and what pleasure in poetry.

  ¤

  Jeremy Butman is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research and adjunct professor of philosophy at Pace University. His reviews, interviews, fiction, and letters have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, and Rain Taxi.

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver

  By Matthew Dickman

  Published 2012-10-01 00:00:00
  W.W. Norton
  112 Pages

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• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2013/03/mayakovskys-revolver-by-matthew-dickman/
  Word count: 1269

  QUOTED: "This is Dickman’s skill. He tells you his story, intimately conversing with you as one would with an old friend, and he reminds you that although his poem seems to be about himself, what actually throbs beneath the language, words, and story, is an ache for his older brother. Dickman’s conveyance of grief is not melodramatic or saccharine, he does not make sweeping proclamations. Instead, he is subtle."

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew Dickman

  Reviewed By Brachah Goykadosh

  March 15th, 2013

  In case you are wondering, as I know I was, Vladimir Mayakovsky was an early 20th century Russian poet and playwright who committed suicide. Further, Frank O’Hara penned a poem simply titled “Mayakovsky,” where he writes, “That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest” and then, “Now I am quietly waiting for/ the catastrophe of my personality/ to seem beautiful again.” Maybe Matthew Dickman was alluding to both of these poets in his new collection of poetry Mayakovsky’s Revolver. The poems in this collection—mostly quiet and often startling elegies— are concerned with suicide, this “blood on my chest,” and these “catastrophes of personality.” That is to say, at its most intrinsic level, Mayakovsky’s Revolver examines not just the contours, angles of grief, but how grief contours and molds us.

  I feel like I have written about my favorite poem in the collection, “King,” before: maybe that’s because I think about it all the time.

  Dickman begins: “I am always the king of something. Ruined or celebrated,/ newly crowned or just beheaded.” These opening lines contain both a narcissistic grandeur and a day dreaming vagueness. Dickman is “king” not of a specific palace or country, but of “something,” an entity of which he himself was not certain. Then he writes: “I sit in the middle/ of the room in December/ with the windows open, five pills and a razor. My lifelong/ secret. My killing power and my staying/ power.” Besides for the obvious poetry wordplay with “lifelong” which could also be read as “life long,” Dickman also hints at the duality about life and death. By etching out the suicidal scene, the pills, the razors, the open window, and himself sitting there, Dickman shows that our “staying power” is twisted with our “killing power.” He has chosen the staying power, and that is his secret. I am fascinated by this “staying power,” a force that chooses to continue being a force as oppose to a force that chooses to abort.

  Dickman’s poem turns when he introduces his brother. He writes:

  [S]o I put on my black-white
  checkered-Vans, the exact pair of shoes
  my older brother wore when he was still a citizen of the world
  and I go out, I go out into the street
  with my map of the death and look for him,
  for the X he is,

  Maybe it’s the shoes that make these few lines so powerful for me. Dickman chooses a simple wardrobe piece, shoes, black-white checkered Vans to hark back to his older brother. Shoes take us places, walk the earth, and ground, and dust with us, protecting the soft and vulnerable soles of our feet from the harsh elements of the land. To me, the selection of these shoes indicates a desire to be closer to what is now missing, re-unite with a lost soul (I’ll refrain from soul/sole play). Dickman’s “the map of the dead,” his search for the “X” that his brother is, evokes the language of abstraction. How does one become an “X,” if not for in her death. X marks the absence of being, but also a treasure. Dickman scavengers for his brother, who was once a “citizen of the world” so that he can:

  [p]ut the scepter back in his hands, take the red
  cloak from my shoulders and put it around his, lift the crown
  from my head and fit it just above his eyebrows,
  so I can get down on one knee, on both,
  knees, and lower my face and whisper my lord, my master, my king.

  Although I have read these words, this poem, many times, there is still something that startles me as I type them out, thinking about them now. The narcissism essential to the earlier lines of this poem has vanished. Now, Dickman submits to the memory of his dead brother, and his desire to revive him. This was the brother who he idolized and now he longs to idolize him again. Ultimately, this poem is about the lost sibling, the brother who once represented everything but now can only be an X, an absence. However, what intrigues me is Dickman’s metaphoric trajectory from being the king to crowning his brother as king. Dickman. This poem is about the X: the absence. When what we revered has vanished, and we are seized only with the memory cards of what once was, we try to re create what we once admired when we are alone. This is what Dickman seems to saying to me. The void resulting from the loss of a sibling who was king to him has put him in a position where only he can be king, a position he does not fully comprehend, now he is king of “something.”

  It would be useful here to point out that many of the poems in this collection are haunting elegies that Dickman wrote upon the suicide of his older brother. Earlier in the collection, in “Coffee,” Dickman writes:

  Right now
  I’m sitting near a hospital where psychotropics are being
  carried down the hall in a pink cup,
  where someone is lying there and doesn’t know who
  he is.
  […] Once, I had a brother,
  who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke
  his cigarettes and be quit for a moment
  before his brain turned it armadas against him, wanting to burn
  down

  Matthew DickmanWhat fascinates me about “Coffee” (and also “King”), is how Dickman just, at the end, throws it in there, like it is a by-thought instead of the crux of the poem: “Once, I had a brother.” This is Dickman’s skill. He tells you his story, intimately conversing with you as one would with an old friend, and he reminds you that although his poem seems to be about himself, what actually throbs beneath the language, words, and story, is an ache for his older brother. Dickman’s conveyance of grief is not melodramatic or saccharine, he does not make sweeping proclamations. Instead, he is subtle.

  This is not to say that Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a depressing collection. At times, Dickman is exuberant and playful, reminding me of a current-day Frank O’ Hara. His poem, “I Made You Dinner, Bob Kaufman” reminds me of O’Hara’s “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” In the last lines of the poem, Dickman writes, “I made [aioli] from scratch/ because I don’t have to be in hell if I don’t want to be.” This is Dickman’s staying power, his choice to drink coffee in the hospital cafeteria; ultimately, while this collection of poems meditates on mourning, it also realizes and quietly celebrates living.

  Bracha Goykadosh is a graduate student at Brooklyn College. More from this author →

• Cutbank
  http://www.cutbankonline.org/cutbank-blog/2013/11/cutbank-reviews-mayakovskys-revolver-by-mathew-dickman
  Word count: 950

  QUOTED: "Dickman’s poems are full of lines to hold onto, that offer something to readers after they’ve put the book down and go back to their lives."

  CUTBANK REVIEWS: Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Mathew Dickman
  November 5, 2013

  Mayakovsky’s RevolverBy Matthew Dickman W.W. Norton & Co.

  Reviewed by Lauren Hilger

  I keep thinking about the way

  blackberries will make the mouth

  revolver

  of an eight-year-old look like he’s a ghost

  that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see

  my older brother walking through the tall brush

  of his brain. I can see him standing

  in the lobby of the hotel,

  alone, crying along with the ice machine.

  (“Maykovsky’s Revolver”)

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Matthew Dickman’s second collection, reflects on the suicide of the poet’s older brother in the form of elegies and love poems. One section is entitled “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral.” These are as powerful and unflinching as the title suggests. When writing of his late brother, there is a sweet, palpable weirdness. Dickman writes of the graveyard when it’s still Halloween. The brother he lost comes in strangely and always lovingly, embodying alternate and imagined lives.

  […] In this life he has a day off

  and is going to see a movie and buy some popcorn and sit in a darkness

  he can rise from and walk up the aisle like a groom, walk

  out into the air again, and down the street, and whistle maybe, and go home.

  (“More Than One Life”)

  Here Dickman’s long lines, immediate with enthusiasm in All-American Poem, carry grief and a different kind of gratitude. Dickman reminds his readers how good it is to be alive, awful as it is. He brings in his friends, family, city, heroes, and beloved everyday routines.

  In a book about mourning it’s difficult to sustain hope. In “Dear Space” Dickman writes, “I can’t seem to live the way I should, without / loneliness, without passing out.” Yet this sadness and recklessness has a youthful resilience. Dickman writes with a kind of forever-teen appeal. These poems seem to exist from within an American adolescence: “socks worn too long” and a lover’s room with “piles of clothes on the floor.”

  This adolescent attitude comes in to show another side of being human, not so forgiving, not so sure. In the poem, “Bridge,” two young women insult the narrator; one spits a homophobic slur. Dickman responds with the following: “I don’t know anyone / who would sleep with them, who would / pull their jeans down and lift / their tiny hairs with the tip of his / tongue. Who would want their ass / in his face or the smell of ketchup and pickles slipping into his / mouth.” The poem continues to detail their “heavy bodies,” “dumb thumping,” and “fake jeweled sandals” as he cannot (then does) imagine them throwing themselves off a bridge.

  These poems seem perfectly all right making the reader uncomfortable. Women in this collection, not familial, not Anna Akhmatova, are often described as articles of their clothing or displayed body parts. In one poem, the narrator declares, “I wonder if it matters that I can’t remember / her name, although we kissed on my front porch.” This is not to say Dickman doesn’t acknowledge cruelty; to be sure, the voice wonders if he can kill the “mean little kid I keep in my pocket for weakness and rage.” He writes into memories of middle school taunting (“Say you’re fat! Say it, say you’re fat”) and attempts to consider objectification and categorization from both sides.

  Dickman’s poems are full of lines to hold onto, that offer something to readers after they’ve put the book down and go back to their lives. (Spilling coffee down my wrist and sleeve will always remind this reviewer of Marie Howe’s “This is what the living do.”) One such memorable and important line comes from the poem, “I Made You Dinner, Bob Kaufman!” where Dickman concludes, “because I don’t have to be in hell if I don’t want to be.”

  It’s this affirming sentiment that readers receive and for which readers come to Dickman. He ends these poems to stun:

  In the yard while you pick at the grass,

  staring up at the sky, and cry and scream for missing it.

  Click here to purchase from Amazon, or visit your local bookstore.

  ___________________________________________________

  Lauren Hilger’s poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Green Mountains Review. She has received a fellowship from The MacDowell Colony and the Agha Shahid Ali scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

  Mathew Dickman received a B.A. from the University of Oregon and has been the 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. He is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something about a Black Scarf, and two full-length poetry collections, All-American Poem (Copper Canyon Press 2008) and Mayakovsky's Revolver (Norton 2012). He is also the coauthor, with his twin brother Michael Dickman, of the poetry collection 50 American Plays, (Copper Canyon Press 2012).
  In Features, Reviews

• The Lit Pub
  http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/mayakovskys-revolver/
  Word count: 864

  Mayakovsky's Revolver
  An Interview with Matthew Dickman
  03/21/13

  MATTHEW SHERLING: What is your favorite meal & why?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: One of my favorite meals is a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. My twin brother, Michael Dickman, and fellow poet Carl Adamshick used to order that classic at a wonderful bar in Portland called Cassidy's when Carl worked downtown . . . it is a perfect meal!

  MS: What is currently your favorite album?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: My favorite album right now is 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe" (don't judge me!).

  MS: If you could wrap up your worldview in one sentence, what would it be?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: Worldview (at the moment) = "Lispector"

  MS: How long have you been writing poetry and what draws you toward it?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have been writing poetry since High School. That's about twenty years. One of the things that draws me to poetry is that through poetry (through art) I better understand myself, I better understand the world I live in. It's also fucking awesome making something out of nothing! When we sit down (or stand up!) with a pen and a blank page it's one of the only moments when we are absolutely free.

  MS: That's a powerful way to look at the practice of art. Can you describe your process when constructing a poem? How much editing / spontaneity is involved?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: Years ago, when writing poems, I would have complete control over the moment of a first draft. That is to say I would think of something to write about, do some research, and then write. Now it's a more reckless experience. I sit down and begin to write with, often, no idea of what will be written. I'm moved to make something. I'm in love or sad or hopeful or have had too much coffee and so I want to let it out. What happens feels up to the moment. After that I redraft, I share it with friends and listen to what they have to say. Some poems go through numerous drafts. Others only one or two. The spontaneity is in deciding to build a boat. The editing is making sure the boat will actually sail. Though sinking sometimes feels good too!

  Are there any poets who particularly inspire(d) you now or when you first got into the craft?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: YES!

  Andre Breton

  Dorianne Laux

  Joseph Millar

  Marie Howe

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Dorothea Lasky

  Pedro Mir

  Diane Wakoski

  Eileen Miles

  Frank O'Hara

  Bob Kaufman

  Anthony McCann

  Dunya Mikhail (sp?)

  ...to name only a couple that comes to mind today while the sun falls and night walks into Portland, Oregon...

  MS: Cool! Your work seems to be considerably accessible. Is this something you shoot for? also, what is it that draws you to more 'surrealist' writers Breton and Haufman?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: I think the only thing I shoot for when writing is something that engages me. Of course it might not engage anyone else! Also, I believe all art is accessible, expecially if you accept a certain amount of mystery in your life...Writers like Breton and Kaufman remind me that the landscape of poetry is not the landscape of earth with fences and continents but outer space... way outer space!

  MS: Can you say a bit more about your use of 'landscape'? Also, how do you feel about 'Objectivist' or 'Imagist' poets who place heightened emphasis on the 'thing itself' // the "real"?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: Landscapes, for millions of years, have been both inner and outer (like belly buttons!) and our inner-landscapes affect the outer-landscapes we walk around on--as does our physical environment affect our emotional environment. Sometimes I can't tell the two apart. The "thing itself" is never, of course, actually the "thing itself" once it's placed into a poem or another piece of art. It has been translated, managed, slightly tuned to another frequency. A choice has been made by an entity outside of the "thing" or the "real" object removing that object from it's (let's say) first truth and placing it in another truth... the truth of the meaning-making artist using it or applying it in some way or another to her work.

  MS: Can you tell us about your current project?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have a new book out this month, Mayakovsky's Revolver, and am working on a chapbook with the poet Julia Cohen. The poems in the chapbook came out of seven days of writing together in Brooklyn. The writing based on questions we asked each other and random words.
  Matthew Sherling
  Matthew Sherling lives in San Francisco. He runs an interview blog called Cutty Spot & an online lit magazine, Gesture. Among other places, his work appears or is upcoming in The Columbia Review, The Believer, Thought Catalog, Fanzine, BIRP!, NAP, Upliterature & Banango Lit.

• Contemporary Poetry Review
  http://www.cprw.com/all-messed-up-g-m-palmer-on-matthew-dickman
  Word count: 1444

  QUOTED: "While the concept isn’t bad, the execution is. Mayakovsky’s Revolver ultimately reads like a book of therapy, not poetry."

  All Messed Up: G.M. Palmer on Matthew Dickman
  Posted on 11 October 2012

  Matthew Dickman

  Reviewed: Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew Dickman. Norton, 2012.

  Shot full of suicides, clichés, and sex, Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a collection of poems not unlike A Confederacy of Dunces—a mediocre work made important by personal tragedy. In Dickman’s case, as evidenced by the back cover, the suicide of his older brother. While there is no reason to wish Mr. Dickman or his family anything but sympathies regarding their loss, one does not get a pass for poor literature because of tragic circumstances surrounding its creation.

  The collection opens with the proem “In Heaven” where Dickman tells us “all the sweetness is gone.” The poem would be a distillation of the entire book, with its bleak images (dogs “punched in the face”), f-bombs (“because Motherfucker and because Fuck Off”), people with a death-wish (“young mothers smoking cigarettes”) and Updike-like tawdry sex (“cheap high heels left in the rain”), were it not for the fact that Dickman’s “Heaven” has none of these. Indeed, the list we get is of things that are missing. Unfortunately Dickman pines not for what his “Heaven” is but for these missing examples of “sweetness”—smoking mothers and face-punched dogs—and it is their bleak images that remain upon the pages.

  Section one, “Dear Space” is by far the weakest and worst section of Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Perhaps this is some meta-construction wherein the mind of the overarching narrator is illustrated by the shoddy poetics that get steadily better—but never good—as the book continues. If so, delightful, but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to force himself through 25 pages of “Space” in order to discover only a lukewarm reward in the final 50 pages. It opens with “Akhmatova,” a Russian writer who, unlike nearly everyone else name-checked in the book did not kill herself, but it nevertheless remains a referential shorthand for “I’m an educated, literary type because I love Anna.” The poem itself doesn’t rise to the reputation of Anna Akhmatova, attempting instead to pass off memories of beaches and stock-character cruel nuns as something other than cliché. The next poem, “Bridge,” mistakes It’s A Wonderful Life for a movie from the 1950s while managing to allude to both “Aqualung” and Twilight, preserving the social integrity of the former and the syntactical complexity of the latter.

  The mess of conglomerated pop culture runs through “Fire” and “Weird Science” until “Dear Space,” where the references to The Donna Reed Show, The Marx Brothers, and YouTube either finally make sense or simply make less nonsense than their previous counterparts. The section increases in quality with “Gas Station” but

  like a mother picking up all the dirty clothes
  in a house full of children
  who never listen to a word she says

  the collection collapses again with the terrible “My Father in Russia” wherein our narrator imagines his father online:

  a beautiful bride, a blonde
  with lips full of collagen and breasts
  that lift up into the heavy gravity of earth,
  I’ve seen him at night
  when I’ve been lonely
  . . .
  I want him and tie him up
  with the silk stockings I sent
  as promise of another life

  “The Summer’s Over, Jack Spicer!” manages to restore some beauty (while name-checking another tragically dead poet) but, like the false heaven of the proem, only leads us “into a Paris that doesn’t exist.” “Halcion” and “Blue Sky” close out the first half of “Dear Space” with limp imitations of suicide.

  This is followed by “Notes Passed to My Brother On the Occasion of His Funeral,” a long poem in several sections that is never as meaningful as the title is cute. Nevertheless, it has some of the first high spots of the entire collection. Number 2, “Coffee,” is a lovely paean to the drink while being an homage to the narrator’s dead brother.

  Once, I had a brother
  who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke
  his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment
  before his brain turned its armadas against him, wanting to burn down
  his cities and villages, before grief
  became his capital with its one loyal flag and his face,
  perhaps only his beautiful left eye,
  shimmering on the surface of his Americano
  like a dark star.

  The remaining poems in “Notes Passed. . .” are not bad—and if pockmarked by unfortunate Fifty Shades of Grey-esque sexuality like “hot nipple-action” then a reader who has endured “Dear Space” is willing to forgive such lesser errors. The remaining highlights of the section not marred by a desire to be the poetic Bret Easton Ellis, circa 1990, are few. In Number 9, “The Bomb,” we “kick the body just to see how it feels, to see if a sound comes out.” Perhaps this, again, is symbolic of all Dickman is attempting with this collection—kicking the body to see what poems come out. The result is often as grotesque as the notion, but does produce a few gems, like Number 13, “Anything You Want”:

  My living brother
  is treating us to dinner. . .
  Anything you want
  he says. His voice warm. . .
  The other one,
  my dead brother, is sitting
  in the dark of the graveyard. . .
  picking at a scab on his wrist.
  He looks up, opens his arms
  wide above the grass. Anything you want, he says. His body beginning
  to wash out, his voice slowly crawling back.

  Part Two is titled “Elegy to a Goldfish.” Not to be outdone by the poor taste of trivializing the elegiac nature of Mayakovsky’s Revolver and his dead brother, Dickman opens the section with “Ghost Story,” a poem whose pedophile punchline about “sexy kids” is perhaps its most endearing part. Beginning with “Cloud,” the book begins its descent into nostalgic madness, with references to more suicides (“Morning with Pavese”) the murdered, impossibly important goldfish of the titular “Elegy” (“in every country / countless deaths, but none as important / as yours”), and the “growing up too fast” trope of “In Claverack,” where a young girl’s “suffering is yet to be invented.” The rest of the section is an equally unremarkable claptrap of pop culture and personal angst.

  Part Two of “Elegy to a Goldfish” is the long poem “On Earth.” It’s nice and prosaic in parts:

  I wanted to be in love
  with someone, drinking orange sodas on our backs
  with the sky unbuttoning our jeans
  and pulling off our shirts

  The poem smacks of shoddy workmanship, like Dickman’s final image of survival

  built out of luck and treatment centers
  or slow like a planet being born, before
  there was anyone to survive,
  the gases of the big bang just settling, or it’s built
  like a skyscraper, by hand, some workmen
  falling, and some safe on the scaffold, up above the earth,
  unwrapping the sandwiches they have been waiting all day to eat.

  That image, perhaps, is Dickman’s purpose in creating Mayakovsky’s Revolver. We struggle through a mess, sometimes exploding, sometimes falling, in order to make a return to normalcy. The epic cycle writ through poor poems. While the concept isn’t bad, the execution is. Mayakovsky’s Revolver ultimately reads like a book of therapy, not poetry.
  This post was written by:

  G. M. Palmer - who has written 2 posts on Contemporary Poetry Review.

  G.M. Palmer writes, preaches, teaches, and wrangles children on an urban farm in Northeast Florida. A founding editor of Strong Verse Poetry Magazine, his poems and reviews can be found in Anti-, Roger, Ezra, The Loch Raven Review, Florida English, Chelsea, and elsewhere. His debut book is With Rough Gods. Previous reviews, criticism, cantankerousness, and theory can be found on his blog.

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• Huffington Post
  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bobby-elliott/the-poetry-that-matters-o_b_1959028.html
  Word count: 1321

  QUOTED: "his poems are a joy to read, with an imagination that is singularly playful and magnetic. ... It is poetry written by a young man, expressive and emotionally honest, about people in his life and the city he grew up in (Portland, Oregon). It can also be funny and romantic, sweet and earnest."

  The Poetry That Matters Most: On Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver
  headshot
  By Bobby Elliott

  There was a time, not too long ago, when every Matthew Dickman poem I came across made me smile. I was in awe of his poems. In truth, they were the kind I wanted to be writing: young, unimpeded by their critics and enjoyable to read — incredibly enjoyable. As much as I have loved poetry, I don’t particularly like that it can be so opaque, and in Matthew Dickman’s poems I believed there was a promising, alternate path for me to follow, forged by a poet I would be reading for the rest of my life.

  So, of course, the book I looked forward to most this year was Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver. I looked forward to it like I was 12 and it was a new video game. I counted the days, I felt them go slower for all the waiting; I even periodically googled the book, to see if its release date had been moved up or pushed back. I had heard and read a couple of the new poems and I knew that it was a book built around a series of elegies for the poet’s older brother, but once I finally received my copy of Mayakovsky’s Revolver I realized very quickly that it was not the book I expected it to be. It was not a book anyone was going to be smiling through.

  Because however much Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a book powered by its elegies, nearly all of the poems concern death and suicide. Trouble loomed in Dickman’s 2008 debut, All-American Poem, but never quite like this:

  “Mayakovsky’s Revolver”

  I keep thinking about the way
  blackberries will make the mouth
  of an eight-year-old look like he’s a ghost
  that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see
  my older brother walking through the tall brush
  of his brain. I can see him standing
  in the lobby of the hotel,
  alone, crying along with the ice machine.
  Instead of the moon
  I’ve been falling for the lunar light pouring out of a plastic shell
  I’ve plugged into the bathroom wall. Online
  someone is claiming to own Mayakovsky’s revolver
  which they will sell for only fifty thousand dollars. Why didn’t I
  think of that? Remove the socks from my dead brother’s feet
  and trade them in for a small bit
  of change, a ticket to a movie, something
  with a receipt, proof I was busy living,
  that I didn’t stay in all night weeping,
  that I didn’t stay up
  drawing a gun over and over
  with a black marker, that I didn’t cut
  out the best one, or stand
  in front of the mirror, pulling the paper trigger until it tore away.

  In another poem from Mayakovsky’s Revolver, “Blue Sky,” Dickman writes: “I’m wondering / if it matters that I am stepping onto the flat head of a concrete gargoyle, / looking down at the parking lots below.” In another, entitled “King”: “I sit in the middle / of the room in December / with the windows open, five pills and a razor. My lifelong / secret. My killing power and my staying / power.”

  As these quotes suggest, Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a book of dark and reeling poems. Its elegies are bluntly sad and its poems touching on suicide, often idealizing it, are difficult to read. Unlike All-American Poem, you may want to put down Mayakovsky’s Revolver, returning to it only after you’ve spent an afternoon outside. It can feel damning and steely (“Everything that has happened will happen again”), it can feel oddly voyeuristic (as in “I sit in the middle / of the room in December / with the windows open, five pills and a razor...”), and it can strain to reassure (“I don’t have to be in hell if I don’t want to be”). When the ebullient, charming Dickman we had met in All-American Poem reappears in Mayakovsky’s Revolver, it is often outweighed and outdueled by the Dickman suddenly on the ledge.

  Yet none of this necessarily suggests Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a weaker book of poems for all its darkness. The climate has changed and, until you get to the last poems (“Getting it Right” and “On Earth” are vintage-Dickman), you probably won’t be smiling, but Matthew Dickman’s poetry remains as vital as it gets. He’s not always a “perfect” poet — in some moments he can sound a little too naïve for my taste (“whatever strength he had / as an older brother, as someone / his sister could look up to from behind her big blue eyes”) — and yet, there is no other poet writing today that I would rather be reading.

  “Anything You Want”

  My living brother
  is treating us to dinner. He opens the menu wide like a set of wings
  across the table. Anything you want
  he says. His voice warm
  above the shining heaven of the silverware. The other one,
  my dead brother, is sitting
  in the dark in the graveyard, his back leaning back against his name.
  I’m walking by with my favorite drug
  inside me. He’s picking at a scab on his wrist.
  He looks up, opens his arms
  wide above the grass. Anything you want, he says. His body
  beginning
  to wash out, his voice slowly crawling back.

  In the poetry world, this is the stuff of controversy and debate — for reasons I won’t waste your time with here. In the world, I think this is the poetry that matters most. The resonating qualities of “Anything You Want,” which concludes the thirteen-part series, “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral,” are the qualities I covet most about Dickman’s work and those that make his poems so appealing and unusual in poetry - his poems are a joy to read, with an imagination that is singularly playful and magnetic (“His voice warm / above the shining heaven of the silverware”); it is poetry written by a young man, expressive and emotionally honest, about people in his life and the city he grew up in (Portland, Oregon). It can also be funny and romantic, sweet and earnest. Poets love the idea of a public poetry, but can’t stand the face of it when it’s here — if Billy Collins was our last public poet, perhaps it is Matthew Dickman that will emerge as our next, which would be a blessing.

  As strange as it can feel and as strange as it may sound, it isn’t always easy to enjoy the thing you love. You can forget what it is about that thing that made you fall in love in the first place. Matthew Dickman’s poetry has always reminded me of why I fell in love with poetry. I think it will make others remember, too; it may even make you fall in love with poetry for the first time. I’m already waiting for that third book.
  headshot
  Bobby Elliott
  Poet and writer living in Portland, Oregon
  MORE:

• Portland Book Review
  http://portlandbookreview.com/2014/08/mayakovskys-revolver-poems-2/
  Word count: 435

  QUOTED: "Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a tenderly haunting collection by a strong, emerging young American poet."

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver: Poems by Matthew Dickman
  by Michael Julian on August 28, 2014

  Matthew Dickman’s poems are haunted – haunted with memories, people, memories of people, haunted by impressions and depression. The voice of these poems is often distant and detached, yet a tenderness and empathy shines through. In “Weird Science” the narrator substitutes a pile of clothes for his absent lover next to him in bed, while “Dear Space” is a meditative piece about human frailty and finitude in the form of a letter to the cosmos. The section “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral” is a powerful thirteen-part elegy for the poet’s deceased older brother. In it, the narrator grapples with grief, loneliness, despair and death.
  Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
  Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
  Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | iBooks

  “You have not died yet. Instead,
  you are walking down Thirteenth Avenue
  drinking your coffee,
  thinking about death.”

  The subject of suicide is a recurring theme throughout the poems. The title of the collection is a reference to the Russian and Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930. In the titular poem, the narrator muses on making a gun out of paper and pulling the trigger until it tears away. The last section, “On Earth” is a stunning and intense poem about the pain of continuing to live after those we have loved have died, whether from cancer, a car accident, or suicide. It is about the conflicting desires to give up and to continue living.

  The poems in this collection seem to bleed into one another; similar themes, images, and motifs are interwoven throughout. In terms of form, the poems are all the same. This gives the collection a definite unity, but also a slight monotony. Still, Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a tenderly haunting collection by a strong, emerging young American poet.

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  Poetry, Reviews
  Matthew DickmanMayakovsky's Revolver: PoemsMichael JulianW.W. Norton & Company
  About the Author
  Michael Julian
  Michael Julian is a writer, poet, and editor. He is currently working toward a MFA in Writing at Pacific University. He enjoys reading poetry, literary fiction, history, science fiction and fantasy. He lives in northern California.

• Signature
  http://www.signature-reads.com/2015/02/on-the-new-yorker-presents-a-qa-poet-matthew-dickman/
  Word count: 1206

  On 'The New Yorker Presents': A Q&A with Poet Matthew Dickman
  By Dave Odegard
  February 24, 2015
  Matthew Dickman/Photo courtesy of the author
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  Among the handful of Amazon's recently released pilots for prospective full series pickups (the online giant prefers a Darwinian approach to its original streaming programing, allowing online viewers to watch and vote on possible new shows) is the docu-series "The New Yorker Presents." Essentially a video version of The New Yorker magazine, "The New Yorker Presents" features an assortment of short films based on content originally published in its print parent. It was announced earlier this month that "The New Yorker Presents" is indeed one of the five series with which Amazon will move forward.
  Buy The Book
  Mayakovsky's Revolver

  by Matthew Dickman
  Amazon
  Barnes & Noble
  Indiebound
  iBooks

  One of the short pieces in the series is a film version of a selection from the poem "King" by Matthew Dickman, performed by Andrew Garfield ("The Social Network," "The Amazing Spider-Man"). Dickman, along with his identical twin brother (and fellow poet), Michael, has seen his poetry published in the famed magazine since 2008. He and his brother were even the dual subjects of a 2009 full feature profile.

  Signature recently caught up with Dickman and spoke about his initial reactions to the project, what it's like to have a personal piece of writing performed by a Hollywood actor, and whose poetry he'd like to see in future episodes of the series.

  SIGNATURE: So what was your reaction when you were first approached about your poem "King" being featured in the pilot episode of "The New Yorker Presents" on Amazon?

  MATTHEW DICKMAN: My reaction was one of surprise. I think I'm always surprised when a project like this decides to include poetry, you know? [Laughs] Because poetry isn't something that often would be included in a film project of this sort of caliber ... And of course I was really surprised that they were wanting to include one of my poems.

  SIG: What did you first think when you heard that Andrew Garfield was coming on board to read/perform your work?

  MD: I don't know Andrew. But since the project got going and started getting made, he and I had a couple of really nice e-mail exchanges and that kind of made me less nervous. I was a little nervous that, you know, an actor or actress might read the poem or present the poem in a way that was super dramatic or over the top or might not reach into the poem and really feel the poem.

  SIG: Do you think that someone who watches "The New Yorker Presents" and sees a segment based on one of your poems is experiencing it differently from just reading it in the magazine?

  MD: Yeah, absolutely ... we're raised in a way that poetry is this mysterious thing that no one can understand and that it's some sort of ancient puzzle that you need your high school teacher to help you solve. So people are put off of poetry fairly early in their lives. And poetry on film is also film. They're comfortable with film ... I think it's creating a sort of diplomat for poetry to go out and reach people that it might otherwise not reach. And that to me is super, super important. I would really like the life of poetry to go beyond the bookshelf and beyond the classroom ... I want people to experience poetry and see that it's not some unreasonable puzzle, that it's about their lives and it's a kind of literature that they can really engage with.

  SIG: Can you explain the history behind writing "King"?

  MD: So "King" comes out of this sequence of poems that are in the center of my second book, Mayakovsky's Revolver, and the section in the book is titled "Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral" and it's a group of elegies for my older brother, Darin, who died of suicide. And when Darin passed away, there were several years I didn't write about his death. I just couldn't write about it. Not because it was necessarily too painful, but I guess it was painful enough that it was hard for me to find any language around it to write about it except for the fact that he was gone. And then eventually enough time passed and I started writing these little sixteen- to twenty-line poems about him and "King" was one of them.

  SIG: Did you have any concerns about such a personal poem being adapted to a short film version?

  MD: Initially my main concern ... was that I wanted to make sure that whoever was going to be in the film, saying the poem ... that they spent time with the poem, knew the history of the poem and that whoever they chose, they chose someone who was able to be an empathetic person with that piece. That was a concern because it is a personal poem. You'd hate to see anything you wrote be performed in some non-empathetic sort of fake way, but especially with a poem like this. And after a few e-mails with Andrew, those concerns were totally pushed aside.

  SIG: The film is dedicated to and uses footage and photos of someone who is not your brother Darin. Can you comment on that decision?

  MD: It was dedicated to another young man, who also died in, I believe, the same way ... Initially, when we were talking about what it would be like, the director was asking about footage or photos of my own brother. And I started reaching out to sort of see if I could pull some things together, but my family is so sort of disparate and there are so many different kinds of attitudes toward my brother's death among different family members, it was kind of impossible to collect enough things. And then this other person's story came up and they were wondering about including that in the film, which I thought was fine.

  SIG: If "The New Yorker Presents" gets picked up for a full series [It was announced 2/18/15 that it's been picked up. -Ed.], do you have any thoughts on which poets should be featured in future episodes?

  MD: Well, from The New Yorker ... of course, I'd like to see my twin brother! [Laughs]

  SIG: Of course ... But I think you have to say that, though.

  MD: I have to say that ... but other than my twin brother, I'd love to see poems by W. S. Merwin. I'd love to see poems by Marie Howe. It'd be great to see one of her poems made into a film. Gerald Stern is a favorite poet of mine. I'd love to see this poet Yusef Komunyakaa made into a film. There's many, many people, but those are a small handful.

  Check out the first episode of "The New Yorker Presents" here.

• The The
  http://www.thethepoetry.com/2012/08/a-new-twist-on-confessional-poetics-mayakovskys-revolver-by-matthew-dickman/
  Word count: 2550

  QUOTED: "What other readers will discover is a maturing poet, fashioning a poetics that bares his whole life in its making, shifting at times dizzyingly between present and past ... in a way that underscores how alive the past is within our present."

  A New Twist on Confessional Poetics? Mayakovsky’s Revolver, by Matthew Dickman
  Evan Hansen August 23, 2012

  Mayakovsky’s Revolver
  By Matthew Dickman
  WW Norton
  Forthcoming October 2012
  ISBN 978-0-393-08119-0
  112 pages

  Matthew Dickman received the second fan letter I’ve ever written. The first was written in 1989, when I was ten years old, and it was addressed to Howard Johnson, an infielder for the New York Mets. Johnson—or “HoJo,” to baseball cognoscenti—wore a mustache, was a streaky but potentially game-changing offensive player, and served as a modest liability in the field. He received zero votes in his lone appearance on a Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in 2001.

  In 2008, after I’d all but forgotten my letter to HoJo, I came across Matthew Dickman’s first book, All-American Poem, at Portland’s great independent bookstore, Powell’s. I learned from a shelf display that Dickman was just a couple years older than I, and that we’d both grown up in Southeast Portland. I bought the book and wrote to him at an email address I found online. He wrote back promptly and warmly—it turns out he’s a really nice guy, in addition to being a fine young poet.

  The latter characteristic in mind, I very much admired Dickman’s debut collection. It was refreshing to read poetry so largely disinterested in lyrical artifice, and to find poems where movement trumped shape and form. And what I’m referring to when I say “lyrical artifice” are poets’ mechanisms for making the familiar strange, reifying everyday cognition into compressed, independent language-objects. Un-All-American Poem-esque poems carry us away from everyday language use in their very shaping—they feature musical and lineation patterns, disjunction, and collage, among other meaning-related strategies. In doing so, they highlight language practices we take for granted, or reveal new linguistic possibilities. To me, contemporary lyric can be thrillingly challenging at its best and annoyingly esoteric at its worst; Dickman’s twin brother, Michael, is a fine poet who writes with what I’d describe as a kind of careful, vatic lyricism, in fact. But Matthew’s first book feels liberated from self-consciousness about form, devoid of desire to play with syntax or to deviate from conventional speech rhythms. The voice in All-American Poem feels earnest, occasionally a bit lonesome, often kind, and charmingly funny.

  Now, as I reread this characterization of that book’s poetics—“liberated from self-consciousness about form”—I realize that others, especially poets I know who are partial to exacting lyric, may be turned off by this description. I’m making Dickman’s work sound too straight and prosy, I think. The truth is, there are poetic preoccupations beyond the shape of the work worth paying attention to in Mayakovsky’s Revolver. These preoccupations are evident in the writing of Dickman’s contemporaries, as well: Ben Lerner, Ariana Reines, Tao Lin, and a host of others are writing in different forms with one commonality—they offer a new take on confessional poetics. Dickman’s poetics are largely unmoored from the trappings of the identity politics that in part guided previous generations’ work. Consciously or subconsciously, like the poets mentioned above, Dickman is influenced by reality TV (because aren’t we all, really?) and he shares the banal, sweet, ugly, and idiosyncratic details of his life with his readers, curating and modulating them with a conflicted internal monologue. This dance between an ostensibly unfiltered revelation of Self with a not-so-behind-the-scenes, self-conscious Poet/Director makes for interesting drama about what it means to be human.

  The underlying question of these poems as artistic products is: Why should one make these details public? At times, Dickman himself almost seems on the verge of wrestling explicitly with this question in Mayakovsky’s Revolver, further dramatizing something about our particular moment of ubiquitous information, the total-life-disclosure aspects of contemporary media, and what all this means to us as people.

  Opening Mayakovsky to any given page and turning the book on its side, one finds unruly, short and long lines staring back like a yard grown feral, or a silhouette of a city skyline with no regard for zoning. The poet deploys All-American Poem’s laissez-faire, unruly stichic form again in his second collection. Occasionally, however, his work is more formally daring than feels familiar, while always the narrative feels intriguingly like a kind of memoir with no clear plot sequence or payoff. We need only look at the opening of the poem The Madness of King George to see Dickman’s breezy-feeling but cumulatively sophisticated confessional poetics at work in this larger structure:

  It’s time for me to go. I drink
  a beer and whiskey, although I should be sipping
  Italian sodas, should be home
  watching an old movie
  or reading a crime novel but I decided to feed my limitations
  instead…

  We note that the lines are random lengths, meander with the music of plain speech, and are enjambed with effective intuition vis-à-vis dynamic ambiguities in meaning. Additionally, we find the narrative convention of setting, and that the setting here is generic—a bar. We also find some tension created with another narrative convention that works well for authors and/or characters to share information with their auditors—internal monologue, i.e., “…I decided to feed my limitations…” Yet Dickman is merely easing us in by staging the scene familiarly: the trope of the guilty bar experience. His speaker continues:

  The woman sitting next to me
  calls herself Summer and keeps touching her lips
  and scratching her thigh
  and ordering a martini
  and talking about history. George Washington
  and the madness of King George. He would walk around
  the palace garden wearing nothing
  but his crown, crying, holding his gaudy scepter in his hands
  like an infant….

  Reading thoughtfully, we see Dickman lace this seemingly straight narrative poem with allegorical and allusive meanings. The woman next to the speaker is conflated with our hot season—which for a lot of youngish people who live basically Everywhere-in-the-World is booze-filled and at least a little erotic. Summer is notably separated from the speaker, however, although she’s close. Further, she isn’t offering up cliché bar banter. Her performance—because that’s what it is, Dickman suggests in the dramatic, paratactic litany of blocking that precedes her dialogue—includes holding forth about historically contemporary Georges: Washington, an emblem of American independence, and King George III of the United Kingdom, who is remembered for his mental illness as well as for being the “King who lost America.” Dickman doesn’t miss a beat in this seamless-feeling narrative lyric poem (to borrow a phrase from his friend, Major Jackson); however, he begins to complicate things further by investing more agency in his narrator. Upon witnessing this quotidian yet strange performance, the narrator shifts position from passive auditor to conflicted actor in both physical and internal confessional space:

  …I am like him, I thought,
  and ask for my bill
  while this other person, this other
  life puts her hand on my knee. Do you ever think
  what would have happened if Germany won the war?
  she says….

  This “this other / life” bit is not incidental melodrama as the poet both feeds and seeks to collapse the question that contemporary art (including reality TV) often begs: Are these actors working from a script, with some other, unspoken agenda, or are they earnest people, communicating authentically in order to fulfill a human need? Dickman subtly and successfully dramatizes that concern here—and he seldom spares himself from critical scrutiny in the whole collection, as practically all of the narrators share a common voice, or are clearly Dickman self-consciously emerging from the cutting room with choice bits of friends’ and family members’ dialogue.

  Packed economically into the above little scene are a man’s own sense of alienation, or conscious failure to engage directly with reality as it is; the threat of a loss of “America” (in this case, a big messy symbol from which the poem moves on quickly); and the horror of an imaginable past in which the Nazis conquered not only Europe, but the whole world. This isn’t really a straight narrative—it’s a confession of feeling absolute and utter resourcelessness in the face of reality and its possibilities and impossibilities. It shares a present that has the past as its kind of palimpsest—present happenings are written over a history that has been erased, but remembered by the impressions in the medium, and the new result is a document layered with meanings. While all this is happening, the poem is rendered with both conversational fluidity and keen, instinctive poetic intellect. We barely feel it happening, yet we know that whatever is happening is in some sense a big deal.

  Speaking of importance, readers will note the first line of the blurb on the back cover: “At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother.” The book’s second section is entitled Notes Passed to my Brother on the Occasion of his Funeral; the prologue is a poem entitled, In Heaven, the epilogue a poem entitled On Earth.

  In Heaven begins with a litany of negated details from Dickman’s youth in Southeast Portland’s Lents neighborhood: “No dog chained to a spike in a yard of dying / grass like the dogs… / no milk in the fridge / no more walking through the street / to the little store / that sold butterfly knives, no more knives, no more honey…” Moving through this negation of basic life details (breathlessly paced in its lack of any road signs but commas until the second page), the poem pivots toward a universalizing blank setting and unnamed cast that includes only the first person plural pronoun, “we,” as it closes:

  …No more looking toward the west, no east, no north
  or south, just us standing here together, asking each other
  if we remember anything, what we loved, what loved us, who yelled our names
  _____first?

  This is a bit of either an obvious or bewildering way to begin the book for a couple of reasons. First, it starts the reader with a section consisting of a single poem—an increasingly common structural device, but one that puts a lot of pressure on the opening piece. Second, the word “Heaven” without any description or discussion or context, comes with a lot of baggage—all Dickman gives us in the way of explanation is a “no more Lord / my God” embedded in his hurried list. Lastly, the gesture of concluding the opening with questions—as if this were an essay and we could hope to find answers somewhere in what follows—seems to promise a lot. It’s a bold move to start this way, really. I will leave it for other readers to decide whether or not it pays off in the end.

  The poem that follows, Akhmatova, opens the first major section, which is called Dear Space. The piece begins at Cannon Beach, Oregon’s tide pools. Right away, Dickman takes up the final questions of In Heaven, about ‘what we remember,’ and drops us into scenes from the past in the first line of the poem: “That’s right!…I was on the beach / looking at Haystack Rock, / putting my finger into the mouths of sea anemones…” For the first time in the book (a few pages in), setting and narrator’s activity are established in Dickman’s major mode, and there’s a Dickman-esque vaguely sexual or dangerous suggestion (putting a finger in mouths, plural). There’s a new desire in the work, though, to link one section or episode to the next, to make a big picture of all the smaller fragments. What emerges, however, is a resistance to allow fragments or distinct narratives to resolve into a comprehensive story. In this seemingly jumbled structure, Dickman subtly bares his own ambivalence about the narrative impulse—picking it up and setting it aside time and again.

  And in Akhmatova, as he often does, Dickman uses the parallel narratives his own life and family and a deftly edited piece of history—a few pointed morsels from the aforementioned Ukrainian poet’s life. Ultimately, the past-tenseness of the work and the choice of analogy leave an astringent sadness on the palate. And it’s worth saying that throughout this collection Dickman offers up both his loves and griefs in what would describe as a “melancholic” register, which, in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Giorgio Agamben describes as “the humor whose disorders are most likely to produce the most destructive consequences…one who keeps his or her own desire fixed to the inaccessible.”

  The voice in Mayakovsky’s Revolver is that of a nostalgic presence—a voice fixed on a past that is no longer accessible. Dickman’s is a particularly painful nostalgia, because some of the characters and places that made up his past are irrevocably changed or lost (and this is ultimately true for us all, which lends universality to his work). This can be sweet and charming; at the same time, of course, it’s also a little painful. The Greek origins of “nostalgia” are nostos, or ‘return home,’ and algia, ‘pain.’ Another early poem in the collection, Weird Science, is a great example of how absence and nostalgia spur Dickman’s poetic impulse. The conceit of Weird Science is that in a woman’s absence, the narrator makes her shape out of clothes in his room, and the poet apostrophizes to his absent paramour.

  In the end, I could go on all day about the multitude of admirable pieces in Mayakovsky’s Revolver. What other readers will discover is a maturing poet, fashioning a poetics that bares his whole life in its making, shifting at times dizzyingly between present and past—as we see in The Madness of King George, if we read closely and pay attention to verb tenses—in a way that underscores how alive the past is within our present; and how lonely and absent it is, paradoxically, at the same time.
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  Evan Hansen

  Evan Hansen lives in San Francisco. He drives across the Golden Gate Bridge and looks at tourists every day on his way to and from work. His poems have appeared in the Burnside Review, Cimarron Review, Cortland Review, Drunken Boat, Juked, Maggy 1, and a variety of other publications. He and his fiancée are adopting a puppy.

  View all contributions by Evan Hansen

• Santa Fe Writers Project
  https://sfwp.com/mayakovskys-revolver-reviewed-by-jacob-collins-wilson/
  Word count: 1046

  Mayakovsky's Revolver reviewed by Jacob Collins-Wilson

  by admin | Jun 2, 2014 | Reviews, The Journal | 0 comments

  Mayakovsy’s Revolver

  Author: Matthew Dickman

  W.W. Norton, 2012

  ISBN: 978-0-393-34879-8

  $15.95

  Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the follow-up to his award-winning debut and is very much a continuation of his previous work. Many themes, ideas, and topics, such as suicide, brotherly love, happiness, depression and our place in universe are tethered from his first book to his second, but not in a redundant way.

  The book is split into five sections. Sections two and four are more broad in terms of topic. The second section, entitled “One: Dear Space” is more mirrored in topic to the fourth section, “Two: Elegy to a Goldfish.” Both sections offer poems of love, longing, death and self-deprecation sprinkled with becoming a better person (the poems “Bridge” and “Ghost Story” stand out). While the opening and closing sections are each composed of one poem that attempts to describe life “In Heaven” (opening) and life “On Earth” (closing).

  However, it is the third section, “Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral,” we all came for. Dickman’s brother’s suicide is the main force behind this book and the thirteen poems written about his dead brother are stark and exploratory. Some images leave the reader empty.

  For example, from the first poem of the section entitled “My Brother’s Grave”:

  “Two kids / from the high school nearby / will fuck each other on top of him / and I won’t know how to stop them.”

  Those lines are so simple, yet completely helpless, leaving the reader how the speaker feels when thinking of his brother’s grave: he’s dead and the world will keep living, there’s nothing to do. Imbedded in many of those dark poems are instances of pure love, enjoyment, several epiphanies, and comedy. In the midst of suicide, heaven, loss, questioning one’s own existence, Dickman still finds moments to be humorous.

  The poem “Coffee” juxtaposes drinking expensive coffee with current uprisings. Lines 7-12:

  Ethiopia
  where I almost lived for a moment but
  then the rebels surrounded the capital
  so I stayed home and drank
  coffee and listened to the radio
  and heard how they were getting along.

  That is the perfect picture of first-world privilege. Drinking coffee, we can toy with the idea of living in the nations rich in coffee history, and then decide to stay home and drink coffee from those countries because they’re in a dire state of political unrest, and we wouldn’t want to get hurt. Most Dickman fans will be familiar with his poem “Slow Dance” and the pure love expressed for the simple connection we can sometimes have with someone. Those moments are not lost in his second book.

  In “Getting It Right,” a poem celebrating the body (reminiscent of Whitman), Dickman crescendos by directly comparing parts of the body of a lover to nations and governments leading to these lines, “Your shoulders / make me want to raise an army and burn down the embassy.” A violent line, yes, but a line whose implicit hope for a better world, a happier world, doesn’t need explanation because it’s inherent in the actions.

  The poem that stood out the most to me every time I reread the book, was “I Feel Like the Galaxy.” It is part of the section dealing directly with his brother’s suicide. The opening line is direct and hopeful, “You have not died yet.”

  Then Dickman imagines all the mundane things his brother would be doing, all tinged with his future-death, such as, “you are walking down Thirteenth Avenue /… / thinking about death.” The juxtaposition of “You have not died yet” and “thinking about death” are hopeful and then inevitably sad. Dickman’s ability to do both is depressing and haunting. The poem continues to imagine the alive brother living, yet always waiting and hoping for death.

  However, the brother then dies in the poem and Dickman talks about how he still finds him: “in a tin can / of cigarette butts…. / in my kitchen, / in the handle of a knife… / sitting on my bed…” Finally, Dickman goes out on a limb: “You should come back.” Such a simple line with so much self-exposure, so much hope laid out bare for judgment, loss, success.

  You should land in my backyard at night
  ….your spaceship
  makes a great sucking sound
  and begins to lower,
  ….and you
  walking out in your silver uniform
  or in the green and gray body, the silky wet skin
  of an alien. I will take you back
  anyway you want.

  Those final two lines again so open, bare and hopeful. Then, to end the poem:

  I will look into your diamond-
  shaped face….still recognize you
  …sit close
  in the yard while you pick at the grass,
  staring up at the sky, and cry and scream for missing it.

  So much selfishness. So much love and hope and understanding that his brother is dead, and therefore no longer belongs in this world, like an alien, yet still saying, ‘I want you, even if it means you must suffer, I want to be with you.’ The love, like in “Slow Dance,” is whole and pure and perfect and heartbreaking.

  Matthew Dickman’s ability to constantly go out on a limb, searching for love, reasons to live, ways to understand suicide, simple happiness, death, sadness and his ability to question all those things openly, without assumption, simply wondering Why? Why not? What is the benefit? What is the loss? is so much fun to be a part of, is so much fun to wonder, and wander, along with. Probing is something he has always done in his poetry, and we hope he continues his path because his poems are something we learn from.
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• The Stranger
  https://www.thestranger.com/books/2018/03/14/25904293/that-feeling-when-your-friend-becomes-a-nazi
  Word count: 645

  QUOTED: "In his other books there's more verve and whimsy. But in this one it's as if he's confessing the violences of his childhood and his struggles with drugs/mental health to a cop, or to some cool priest, and he's just trying to articulate everything as clearly as possible."

  That Feeling When Your Friend Becomes a Nazi
  Matthew Dickman's third book of poetry wrestles with white supremacy in Portland.
  by Rich Smith
  Thomas James
  Did you ever watch your childhood friend transform into a neo-Nazi right before your eyes? The speaker in Matthew Dickman's Wonderland has, and he details that transformation in a striking series of poems of the same title. (By the way, in poetry school the "speaker" just means the "narrator.") You can hear him read from the book alongside novelist Emily Strelow at Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday, March 17.

  The "Wonderland" poems follow a boy named Caleb, who we first meet in his front yard, hitting a stick against a tree trunk. While he's outside with his imaginary sword, Dad's inside the house, hitting Mom in the face. Caleb walks into the "weird dark" of her bedroom to comfort her, clearly powerless against his father's rage. In the next poem, Caleb's anger takes on its particularly strange and cruel character when he encounters a dog behind a fence. He starts spitting on it, "some of the phlegm / getting into the dog's eyes, / its long ears."

  Caleb is not yet in seventh grade when he starts beating up people randomly, but he's old enough to want beer by the time he got a stick-and-poke tattoo of a swastika on his arm. Dickman records the moment Caleb's anger finds its purest expression in Nazism—and the speaker's own fucked-up, flawed, but completely human reaction to that moment—in this remarkable scene: "When he asked how it looked / I said it looked // good. I couldn't stop / looking at it // but when I looked up at him / it was like his face wasn't there."

  The poem abruptly ends on the image of Caleb's self-deleted face. But in the gong-ring that follows, you can sense the speaker imagining his face replacing Caleb's. Why did Caleb become a Nazi and not him? Dickman's speaker grew up with this Nazi, came from the same neighborhood as this Nazi, skateboarded with this Nazi, went to punk shows with him, witnessed men treat his mother violently just like Caleb did. Could he become a Nazi, or even just a generally terrible person, too?

  That last worry haunts the book. Dickman's speaker is dumbfounded by how lucky he is to still be alive and walking around and looking at swallows do cool stuff. But as he reflects on a rough childhood in Portland—and an adulthood marked by his older brother's suicide—he recognizes just how much worse things could have gone for him, and how bad things could still get.

  Dickman's tense lines and suddenly brutal imagery carry this anxiety. In his other books there's more verve and whimsy. But in this one it's as if he's confessing the violences of his childhood and his struggles with drugs/mental health to a cop, or to some cool priest, and he's just trying to articulate everything as clearly as possible in the hopes that this book—this act of witness crafted into clean couplets—will somehow help stave off the angry wraiths threatening to overtake him and delete his face, and ours if we're not careful.

  Past Related Events
  Matthew Dickman and Emily Strelow
  Elliott Bay Book Company, Sat March 17, 7 pm
  Matthew Dickman and Emily Strelow
  Elliott Bay Book Company, Sat March 17, 7 pm
  Related Locations
  Elliott Bay Book Company
  1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122

• 3 Quarks Daily
  https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/04/matthew-dickmans-wonderland.html
  Word count: 287

  matthew dickman’s ‘wonderland’
  Posted on Apr 12, 2018 9:15AM by admin

  Download (27)Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

  Matthew Dickman’s new book, Wonderland, is full of characters who feel forsaken by God. Much of this new collection—Dickman’s fourth—takes place in Catholic school, where God and Christ are as physical as the poet’s bullied body but are rarely sources of comfort. To the contrary, God is a source of dissonance in Dickman’s poetry. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Dickman was an Episcopalian in a Catholic world, and although he plunders the rituals and ceremonies of Catholicism, he clearly feels distant from that religion. Wonderland suggests that Dickman is not just a spiritual poet, or a devotional one in the mold of Wright, but a poet whose worldview, language, and themes are rooted in the pageantry of the Catholic Church. He represents a tendency in contemporary Catholic poetry—also evident in the work of Natalie Diaz, Patricia Lockwood, and C. Dale Young, for example—to drop doctrinal adherence while retaining a fascination with symbolism. His work occupies a middle ground in which Catholicism is meaningful yet still evokes pessimism, conflict, and doubt.

  In a 2015 interview in Granta, the poet Barbara Ras asks Dickman, “Do you think our religious roots dig so deep they become ghosts we can’t shake off?” Dickman replies, “My personhood is in a great part defined by religion…and so my poems are too.” He goes on to explain that “you have to swim through a bunch of blood” to attain whatever is healthy in life, which includes, according to him, “ideas about transformation, forgiveness, empathy, wonder, metaphor…”

  more here.

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