Interview: Michael Dickman
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
This is Michael’s twin brother Matthew; you get the idea.
This conversation with Michael Dickman will kick off Pages to Pixels’ extended interview series; each month or so, a new author will be featured in a four part, in-depth interview.
Michael’s poetry has a rare personality; his work fearlessly confronts moments of violent energy, challenging with new voice archetypal topics––family, past, death, loss, ghosts.
The poetry works––really works––in its own context. A precursory skim of Michael’s poems might suggest overarching structure and content; upon closer scrutiny, however, his writing becomes a dynamic field of related voices, each unique and strengthening the whole.
Michael’s been called a “young poetic genius,” and his poetry has been likened to the “water from [a] well [that] comes from deep in the earth.” He has received the 2008 Narrative Poetry Prize, and the 2010 James Laughlin Award. He has been published in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Field, Tin House, and Narrative Magazine.
Read more of his work here.
Clearly, as evinced by the interview, he’s got a sense of humor––and the best of me, at this point. Just wait until next time, though.
An Excerpt:
PAGES TO PIXELS
It’s rare to see someone so young also be so established as a poet. Yeats’ writing became more precise as he aged. What are your plans?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
It’s nice to meet you too. It might be helpful for both of us, and for this conversation, to disagree strongly with each other at the outset. So, I will start the disagreeing! It must be said that I am not in any way an established poet. I suppose no one really says “young writer” anymore, opting for the even worse label of “early career poet”. I feel like I am a young writer though! I am 35 years old. No too old, I hope. And have just only published my second book of poems. Young writer. That’s me. Though I hope at some point to be an Old Writer. Is that my plan? Well, I don’t have any plans. This makes planning hard to do. I have promised myself to be open to reading and writing poems for the rest of my life, which of course could run just through tomorrow.
As for the precision of Late Yeats. We should disagree about that in a bar.
PAGES TO PIXELS
Though it’s passé to discuss, I’ve found young writers curious; when do you feel you were accepted and more readily published as a poet? Did a certain award or collection precipitate widespread attention?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
Thank you for calling me a young writer! It will become clearer and clearer that I did not read ahead in this questionnaire. Conversationnaire?
It took a long time for anyone to publish one of my poems because they tended to be long and frankly were most likely not worth the advertising space. I am hardly more publishable now than I was then, in some ways. I still write longish things, that I think are hard on an editor when it comes to room. But that’s okay, because I don’t write for magazines, I write for my friends. Past, present, and future.
There is no widespread attention.
PAGES TO PIXELS
As a literary form, why does poetry attract you?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
It was the first thing I ever tried to write for myself. It was the first thing I tried to make as an adult and I have never thought to write anything else. It continues to be completely fascinating and dazzling to me and mysterious and new and so I can go back to it and go back to it and go back to it.
PAGES TO PIXELS
During what time of day do you prefer to write? Some writers believe environment affects output, while others seem to be able to write anytime, anywhere.
MICHAEL DICKMAN
I have no preferences.
Like our dad Allen Ginsberg said, “I’ll write my poem when I am in my right mind”. Or something like that.
If my brain isn’t too fucked up and I feel really awake then I can write. It doesn’t matter where or when. Oh, but it has to be pretty quiet. No music. No espresso machines.
PAGES TO PIXELS
Given a shrinking audience, writing poetry seems to be an act of economic futility. Does poor pay make poetry romantic or frustrating?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
This is hard to answer in some ways because it is not really your question. It is a false feeling in the atmosphere that you have been told is true. The audience for poetry is not shrinking. It is widening. Ever widening. More people read poems now than ever have before, no thanks to Plato and inherited questions like this one.
Don’t worry though! We still like each other and we are both still having a good time.
I think if you commit yourself to any art in America then money had better be far from your crazy little brain.
Of course, having read a newspaper in the last couple months, I can honestly report that it is hard out there for most people. From Poets to Teachers to Day Traders. Well, maybe not that last group. But it is harder and harder to make a living as a servant of the country, whether that is as a Fireman, Spot Welder, Artist or Food Handler, as is clear in the Union busting states of Wisconsin and New Jersey.
Fuck you Governor Christie!
PAGES TO PIXELS
The New Yorker described your poems thusly: “…interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines.” Certainly, your work favors brevity. What do you like about ‘fragmented’ form?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
I like that it makes me slow down for a minute. It slows everything down. That’s a good feeling. It can make for a kind of quiet and intensity that I get from music. That’s nice. All of these things I get as a reader of other writers fragmented work.
I am drawn to writing like that mostly because of some unspeakable and unknowable impulse. How do you like that? I wish I could write like Frank O’Hara but I can’t. And besides, Frank O’Hara already wrote like Frank O’Hara.
That job posting has been filled.
PAGES TO PIXELS
Rereading for this interview, I noticed your speakers often revisit a conflict of family. I found this especially true in Flies. What draws you to this poetry of difficult family intimacy?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
Frank Bidart had something really great to say about this, which was that when he looked at his own life nothing was figured out, nothing was known. It meant a kind of freedom in writing the poems that were truly his, and not, let’s say, Lowell’s or Bishop’s. That feeling rings very true to me.
For me, in some way, family is the beginning of the universe. Well, relationships are anyway. After The End of the West was published I actually was writing things without explicit family members in them. Then my older brother died and I started having these nightmares about him and some flies. Huge flies. Lots of flies. So I wrote about these dreams.
PAGES TO PIXELS
There’s an inescapable, almost violent, energy to your writing. Your speakers curse, insult, and rage; their words indicate a very bitter, live struggle. Is this violence typical—though possibly sublimated—in human struggle?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
Yes, violence is typical.
PAGES TO PIXELS
Is there a question you wish people would ask about your work?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
Of course not.
But I will tell you, in all honesty, what my favorite question I am asked is:
“I love your book All American Poem! What are you working on now?”
PAGES TO PIXELS
What are you working on now?
MICHAEL DICKMAN
A small handful of new poems.
New to me.
And a book I wrote with Matthew Dickman of poem-plays called 50 American Poems, due out from Copper Canyon Press in 2012… I guess that’s it.
Related posts:
No. 1 — August 5th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
[...] Check out part one, here. [...]