Deep Deliverance

“Lord let me die, but not die out”: James Dickey...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:14:09 -0400

“Lord let me die, but not die out”: James Dickey reading one of his most famous poems: “For the Last Wolverine”

From the new James Dickey channel on YouTube

Two of the great poets of the late 20th century, James Dickey...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:56:40 -0400

Two of the great poets of the late 20th century, James Dickey and Robert Lowell, talk about dreams and nightmares.

James Dickey would have been 90 years old today. In these...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 04:22:00 -0500

James Dickey would have been 90 years old today. In these photographs he was 19.

Some years after my father died in 1997, I was at a loss how to remember him. What was the image I wanted — that I needed — to hold onto? The memories of his face and his physique had turned, through age and grief, to blurs and shadows. But as I was looking at a family album kept by my grandmother I came across these snapshots from 1942 at Sea Island, Georgia, and I realized these were precisely what I’d craved. Of course I never knew this boy, but I knew that all of my father’s life, this was the image that he held in his head of himself. You see it again and again in his poetry, from “The Bee” to “Looking for the Buckhead Boys,” and in his dream of what he called “the happy swimming pool,” which is how he thought of heaven. And because these Apollonian images were so dear to my father, I decided to embrace them, too. They are now, not my memories, but my idea of him, and in my heart I need no other.

== Christopher Dickey

apoetreflects: In a sound I cannot remember. It whispers like straw in my ear, And shakes like a...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:45:16 -0500

apoetreflects:

In a sound I cannot remember.
It whispers like straw in my ear,
And shakes like a stone under water.
My bones stand on tiptoe inside it.
Which part of the sound did I utter?
Is it song, or is half of it whistling?
What spirit has swallowed my tongue?
Or is it a sound I remember?

—James Dickey, section I of “The Call” in “The Owl King” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992 (University Press of New England, 1992)

christopherdickey: “The Heaven of Animals” read by Princess...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:21:39 -0500

christopherdickey:

“The Heaven of Animals” read by Princess Grace

Who knew that Grace Kelly recorded this reading of one of James Dickey’s best known poems in 1977?

Thanks to Ward Briggs for discovering it,

We don’t know why someone found this video of James Dickey...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 04:16:22 -0400

We don’t know why someone found this video of James Dickey reading “The Moon Ground” and posted it just now, but as many of us shared the moment of awe this week when a man in a space suit jumped from a balloon 24 miles above the earth, this has a particular resonance.

The view from the chapel next to the lighthouse in Cap...

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:46:19 -0400

The view from the chapel next to the lighthouse in Cap d’Antibes, France, as it looks today. Notice the old well on the right and compare with the same view in 1954: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BZD30a25FmE/RY95CgCDDKI/AAAAAAAAARs/D4cUx-Lr6Zw/s1600-h/1954-Antibes-binoculars.jpg

James and Maxine Dickey at Willow Plunge Pool in Franklin,...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:46:48 -0400

James and Maxine Dickey at Willow Plunge Pool in Franklin, Tennessee, in the summer of 1949.

This is a marvelous photograph from the collection of Elizabeth and Calhoun Winton, who were great friends of Jim and Maxine as young marrieds and throughout their lives. We’d also like to thank Gordon Van Ness, who first published this in The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1942-1969; Peter W. Anderson, who pulled this together with other memorable photographs of the young James Dickey on Breathnaigh, and Ron Aiken who used it as well in his Southern Partisan essay remembering James Dickey 15 years after the author’s death.

There is little question that this photograph shows Jim and Maxine as they would want to be remembered.

So be it.

A friend of ours saw this picture yesterday and tweeted “I...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 02:58:01 -0400

A friend of ours saw this picture yesterday and tweeted “I want that!” We asked if she meant the photograph. (Peter does sell signed prints.) She said it was a great picture, but what she meant was “the joy.”

christopherdickey:

Another of Peter’s series on his favorite brasserie (and the women in it) in Paris, France.

peterturnley:

La Brasserie de l’Ile Saint-Louis, Paris, 1994. Part of the photo-essay Moments of the Human Condition. See www.peterturnley.com. © Peter Turnley / Corbis 1994. All Rights Reserved.

apoetreflects: “Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies...

Thu, 10 May 2012 02:18:02 -0400

apoetreflects:

“Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.”

—Charles Baudelaire, from Selected Writings on Art and Literature (Penguin Classics, 1993)

Long before “The Hunger Games,” poet and novelist...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 03:16:31 -0400

Long before “The Hunger Games,” poet and novelist James Dickey took up a bow and arrow to shoot, to hunt, to think, to breathe the air of the forest and connect to it. These photographs were taken by Christopher Dickey in 1967 at the Tomochihi archery range in northern Virginia when Dickey was poet laureate at the Library of Congress.

apoetreflects: “Opening a book of poems by Robert Penn Warren...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 08:53:57 -0400

apoetreflects:

“Opening a book of poems by Robert Penn Warren is like putting out the light of the sun, or like plunging into the labyrinth and feeling the thread break after the first corner is passed. One will never come out the same Self as that in which one entered….[Warren] gives you the sense of poetry as a thing of final importance to life: as a way or form of life.”

—James Dickey, from his poetic criticism “Robert Penn Warren” in Babel to Byzantium: Poets & Poetry Now (The Ecco Press, 1981)

NAME THAT POEM! This photograph of a mansucript page is from a...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:10:37 -0400

NAME THAT POEM!

This photograph of a mansucript page is from a series of photographs of James Dickey working in his home office on the top floor of the house he rented in Leesburg Virginia when he was the poet laureate of the United States from 1966-1968. What’s the poem?

The rest of the pictures, taken Christopher Dickey, who was then 16, can be found on the new Facebook page of The James Dickey Newsletter and at the original Deep Deliverance site.

James Dickey shooting in the back yard of his house in Columbia,...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:01:56 -0400

James Dickey shooting in the back yard of his house in Columbia, South Carolina, cerca 1969. Photo by Rollie McKenna.

Christopher Dickey and James B.T. Dickey the winter of 1970-71.

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:48:31 -0400

Christopher Dickey and James B.T. Dickey the winter of 1970-71.

50 years ago this month, our family spent Easter in Positano....

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:37:52 -0400

50 years ago this month, our family spent Easter in Positano. This was taken on a day trip to Paestum, I believe. On the right, James Dickey and Maxine Dickey. On the left, Laura Rispoli and behind her, perhaps, Charlotte Brunsden, then a little girl staying in Positano with her grandmother, Mary Norton, author of the Borrowers books.

christopherdickey: When my father, James Dickey, was a boy in...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:04:02 -0400

christopherdickey:

When my father, James Dickey, was a boy in the 1930s he read every bit of pulp fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs that he could get his hands on. He liked Tarzan, but his favorites were the Mars books (basis for the recent mega-flop John Carter) and the Pellucidar series “at the Earth’s core.” The books were reissued in the early 1960s, some of them by Ballantine, some by Ace. The latter had magnificent covers by the late, great Frank Frazetta. These three seem to be the only ones I saved.

The best single essay on ERB ever written, by the way, was this piece Gore Vidal published in Esquire in 1963:

‘There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking. Fascinated as we all are to know what our countrymen think of great issues (approving, disapproving, “don’t-knowing,” with that same shrewd intelligence which made a primeval wilderness bloom with Howard Johnson signs), the pollsters never get around to asking the sort of interesting personal questions our new-Athenians might be able to answer knowledgeably. For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads? How many consciously daydream, turning on a story in which the dreamer ceases to be an employee of I.B.M. and becomes a handsome demigod moving through splendid palaces, saving maidens from monsters (or monsters from maidens: this is a jaded time). Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusedly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. Clad in tights, rapier in hand, the daydreamers drive their Jaguars at fantastic speeds through a glittering world of adoring love objects, mingling anachronistic histories worlds with science fiction. “Captain, the time-warp’s been closed! We are now trapped in a parallel world, inhabited entirely by women, with three breasts.” Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: The motor drive is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one’s environment through physical strength. I state all this with perfect authority because I have just finished reading several books by the master of American daydreamers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose works today, as anyone who goes into a drugstore or looks at a newsstand can see, have suddenly returned to great popularity.’…

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/gore-vidal-archive/tarzan-revisited-1263#ixzz1rQfVsVHR

“The Master of American Daydreamers” - now that is a sobriquet to envy.

apoetreflects: It may not be written in any book, but it is...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 07:17:27 -0400

apoetreflects:

It may not be written in any book, but it is written—
You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.
No matter how fast you drive, or how hard the slide show
Of memory flicks and releases,
It’s always some other place,
some other car in the driveway,
Someone unrecognizable about to open the door.

—Charles Wright, from “1” in Littlefoot: A Poem (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007)

Wender and Roberts drugstore in Atlanta: …That location,...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 07:15:34 -0400

Wender and Roberts drugstore in Atlanta:

…That location, in a skinny Peachtree storefront between Buckhead Avenue and East Paces Ferry, dated back to the 1920s, and the business was started even earlier, according to Buckhead historians. Mitchell says the place on Piedmont had “the best egg salad sandwiches in the whole world.”

As Mitchell remembers it, the soda fountain at the pharmacy on Peachtree was a place where “girls and boys did what girls and boys do – flirting and carrying on.”

It was so well known as the gathering place for a certain generation that poet James Dickey returned there in verse when he wanted to reconnect with the Buckhead Boys of his youth. “I must go to Wender and Roberts Drug Store …,” he wrote in “Looking for the Buckhead Boys.” “It’s one of the places the Buckhead Boys used to be.”…

— Joe Earle, Reporter Newspapers: Buckhead, 6 April 2012

Deliverance published this day in 1970

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:43:23 -0400

Deliverance published this day in 1970:

The novel “Deliverance” was published 42 years ago today. Barnes and Noble has marked the occasion with an entry on its Daybook blog, which includes notes on Christopher Dickey’s memoir “Summer of Deliverance” as well.