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Photo Ann Wood
Fine Arts Work Center poet Matthew Dickman on a dark rainy day in Provincetown, which, he says, reminds him of his Portland, Ore. home. |
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Poetry for the common man
By Ann Wood
Banner Staff
Forget academia. Matthew Dickman wants the “people from the community that I come from” to get his poems. He’d like to read aloud to some guy called Al who likes to sit and drink on his porch in one of Portland, Oregon’s blue-collar lower-middle class neighborhoods — and have that guy understand what he’s talking about.
“There’s something that’s really constricting about poetry and the poetry written [by academics],” the Fine Arts Work Center fellow says, sipping a coffee at Far Land Provisions. Although he received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin, Dickman has managed to avoid that obscure writing attributed to many academic poets; there’s no pretension in “Roma”: “I ask him if he still loved his dad, or if he loved him now/ that he was dead…When my father died, he says opening a beer, he was no longer/ my father. He was no longer a man. It’s easy to love things/ when they’re powerless, like children and goldfish./ This is the way with enlightened people. They say things/ that are so infuriatingly simple when the world is not./ So I put down my Pepsi and pull out the big card./ What about Hitler? I ask. You can’t love Hitler!/ My neighbor puts a piece of pineapple on his tongue like a sacrament,/ sucks the juice out of it, chews it up, then turns/ his head slow like a cloud and says I can love anybody I feel like loving.”
Dickman will read several recent poems beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown with fiction writer Martin Seay.
Besides his residency here, he has received fellowships from the Oregon Literary Arts and The Vermont Studio Center. His work has been published in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review and Poet Lore, among other literary magazines. Admission to this event is free, and fiction writer Martin Seay, a native Texan and recent graduate of Queens University of Charlotte’s low-residency MFA program, will also read. His short fiction has appeared in Gargoyle, where it received a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Dickman says that because it’s February, he’ll read several love poems, but says that all he writes are love poems anyway. Even “Public Parks”: “Some parks are celebrated for the bushes that men hide behind, touching each/ other/ in the dangerous hour before returning home/ to their wives and boyfriends, setting a table and pulling a roast out of the oven./ Some parks are noted for their baseball fields and some for their swing sets./ Some for their willows/ and some for a body that’s found by hikers, left in the wet/ brown leaves for the worms and twelve o’clock news,/ the reporter combing his hair/ between takes. I have performed Shakespeare/ in the parks. I played a wall and fell in love/ with a girl who played a nymph,/ she wore a green dress made out of shiny vinyl leaves that shimmered and shook/ above her hips. She had a lazy eye and listened to Patti Smith albums.”
Dickman, his identical twin Michael and their younger sister Elizabeth grew up in a dangerous Portland neighborhood under the watch of a protective single mother who often worked two jobs. Their mother “begged” various Catholic schools to take the kids so that they could avoid the violence-ridden public schools.
“She was a hero and a hammer, man,” the 30-year-old poet says. “She was pretty amazing.”
There was a clash between neighborhood and school behavior, and it was another woman who got him into poetry. One of those Catholic high school girls.
“I was interested in a girl who liked poems. I only started writing poems [to try] to get this girl to take her shirt off,” he says. It worked with her, and several girls later on. He’d read the poets these girls admired, emulate them and pass them on.
Dickman only started writing poetry for himself after high school, and says it took eight years to finish his undergraduate degree in theater because he was dabbling in too many drugs and worked several jobs, including one at a warehouse cutting meat; in a hotel; in mom-and-pop grocery stores and as assistant to poet Dorianne Laux.
He spent three years at the Michener Center so that he could be with his brother, a writer who was accepted into the program at the same time. That, and Dickman wasn’t required to teach undergraduates, which he really doesn’t want to do. He worries about being trapped in a world that might lead to him writing about co-eds.
When he turned 29 his poetry began to change. Dickman used to begin a poem only after fully fleshing out the idea and following his own rules of exclusion. He started writing more meditatively.
“Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems…. Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ‘ass,’” he says.
Dickman not only writes for the regular guy, he wants to live that way. When he leaves the Work Center he’ll probably go back to the bakery he worked at in Portland and bake bread.
“I want poetry to be part of my life, but I don’t want poetry to be my life,” he says.
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Feb 9th, 2006