by Matthew Dickman
The American Poetry Review Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming
Tell-Tale Heart
1.
The rumor mills are churning! Why, last week at a party, I heard that All-American poet Matthew Dickman and his newly-minted arch-nemesis Michael Schiavo once were roommates at the…Breadloaf Conference—that the two were friends, or friendly, and that Schiavo made it his business to help less-than-impressive “Dickman 2” fit in with loads of discriminating loafers*. It’s a valuable and meaningful development, punctuated by an *outrageous* comment that “Dickman 1” has apparently made on Schiavo’s blog:
Hello All,
Michael, you owe me around $50 dollars from when you stayed with Matthew in Austin, and never seemed to have money for tacos or beer. I still have receipts. Oh those were the days. Poems and Led Zep! I hope you’re well. Maybe next time Hoagland will pick your book. Are you still writing sonnets?
Yours,
Michael Dickman
In case you didn’t know, there are two Dickmans. They are twins, and both of their names begin with “M,” and they stick up for each other, which I like. Both have published poems in The New Yorker within the last year or so, and first books have emerged from each: Michael’s The End of the West will be published next month (and reviewed on coldfront this Wednesday), and Matthew’s All-American Poem, selected by Tony Hoagland as winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, was published last September. All of this is important, as important as the fact that Matthew Dickman loves his brother. Or, from what I can tell you, *the speaker in Matthew Dickman’s poems* loves some kind of metaphysical brother.
2.
And bang, these poems exist in the metaphysical too. Weird. That makes me feel weird. Let’s talk about that…and then get to the embarrassing pictures, big-time magazines and good old bad blood.
Yes, this is the voice of an openly conversational, emotionally available, not-quite-angsty young glasses-wearer who loves his brother; he openly admits to a sense of competition with him (“I feel like a dog sniffing another dog’s ass”), but generally chooses to emphasize their meaningful bond. I mean, their dance:
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. 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.
Children aren’t especially kind at age three. Here we have the worst and best of Matthew Dickman; an easy, underwhelming “child” simile leading to a boring “dance” metaphor but arriving at a moment of sincerity and mortal clarity.
Think of it as chicken soup for the poet’s soul. Our poet has a recipe; he begins with some particular fact, anecdote or idea, then associates his way into stories, recollections, names of bands and poets, and whatever “ideas” these kinds of things imply. Matthew Dickman is a spinner of tales, a would-be sad bastard sifting the fragments of teenagehood-cum-adulthood to write and write his way to meaning. Sometimes, he knows what to do when he finds it; other times, it is corrupted by toss-me-the-megaphone “Poetic” attacks: in the words of Elaine Benes, big budget movies with plots that go nowhere.
Take for example the book’s first poem, “The Mysterious Human Heart.” I am interested in the heart as a muscle of mine that I’ll never get to see or hold, so I’m rolling with him when he mentions his heart is inside him, “mysterious, / something [he] will never get to hold.” But sure enough, the heart becomes a stand-in for “Desire,” and suddenly I feel like I’m playing a family round of Parker Brothers’ Poetryland: and TGIF is on in the corner, and Domino’s pizza is on the way.
Another poem, “Love,” begins with a list of places where people fall in love; falling in love means more time together, and breeds familiarity: “…we can’t keep our hands off each other / until we can— / so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, falling in love again.” One of Dickman’s regular tools is flagrant sexuality (this isn’t the only reference to S&M), and here, it is surprising, a weird peek into the things people do in order to feel in control of their lives. As we proceed, Dickman merges this with another of his staples, the pop culture reference:
We go to movies and sit in the air-conditioned dark
with strangers who are in love
with heroes like Peter Parker
who loves a girl he can’t have
because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights
more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around
his waist or his tongue between her legs.
Suggesting that these are two different kinds of passion, or beginning a line of questioning as to whether one is sexual love and the other love of duty (does he want to make the world better because he loves her?), might be taking this metaphor, and Spider Man, too seriously. The whole passage skims across the surface, a means to the next end: the next line, idea, example. He moves from an ill-fitting royal “we” to a deeply personal “I,” and the poem is tempted to devolve into juvenilia:
I was living there with a girl who loved to say the word
shuttlecock. She would call
me at work and whisper shuttlecock
into my ear which loved it! The blastoff
of the first word sending the penis into space.
Not that I ever imagined
my cock being a spaceship,
though sometimes men are like astronauts, orbiting
the hot planets of women,
amazed that they have traveled so far, wanting
to land, wanting to document the first walk,
the first moan,
but never truly understanding what
has moved them.
The pathetic fallacy (an ear that loves) is distracting, and each in his series of associations—shuttlecock to cock spaceship to men being like “astronauts, orbiting / the hot planets of women”—seems more shoe-horned than the last (I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that this poet doesn’t “understand” women here are lines from another poem:
Maybe she wants to be measured beyond
the teaspoon shadow of the anus
and the sweet mollusk of the tongue,
beyond the equation of limbs and seen
as a complete absolute.
Yes, women are more than the teaspoon shadow of…what was it again? Matthew Dickman has the soul of a Poet, absolutely). But awkward or forced as much of this feels (the title poem makes mention of every U.S. state, and reads like a poem that tries to include every U.S. state), there’s something to be said for being conversational and clear—for “pitying” the reader (Vonnegut’s term) rather than attempting to impose upon him/her one’s private, inscrutable intellect. There is at times an authentic longing for human connection here, an occasionally charming urge towards empathy, particularly when he concludes “Love”: “I hope / you do not suffer.”
3.
So, there’s nothing to be too worried or offended about here: just some sentences broken into lines, some sexual fantasies, some funny and sad fables that might serve as useful first-person NPR editorials (which I intend as praise). At worst, there’s the sense that the urge to be poetic outstrips the urge to be imaginative: that the poet finds a flat rock in the mud, skips it clean from one side to the other, and walks away with his eyes fixed on his shoes. He is flighty and quick, talkative and oh-so-emo, only barely plumbing the depths of sex and mortality like he might, resolving instead to be The Poet Writing The Poem, trying hard, sometimes too hard, to bring it all in.
As for the real-life storytelling and skull-swatting, well, god bless this mess. Did Hoagland read some of this stuff before Dickman submitted it for consideration? I’ve heard so, and have it in me to hope not, though success will arrive on nebulous terms from now til the end of days, and none of this means Dickman won’t develop into a stronger and stronger poet. The Hoagland thing, if true, seems about the only ethical breach we can divine in relation to these poets. Otherwise, that they have cracked the code and broken at a young age into The New Yorker, that they were in Minority Report, are nothing but successes built into a sideshow. It is bizarre that these guys have become such a big deal, as surely they did not see it coming either; there are far better poets, and phonomenally worse poets. Perhaps American poetry is hard up for heroes or hard up for controversy.
Great to have something to talk about, though, to have those conversations that inevitably end with the sense that these battles take places on shelves of rock in the belly of a sleeping volcano, the rest of civilization functioning just fine without us in the stretches beyond. It’ll be something if soon, we find someone worthy of a collective eruption. In the meantime, I hope the Dickmans and their detractors view all of the insular contention as a good thing, or at least a neutral one, even a cute one.
* June 09 UPDATE! Further milling suggests the two were waiters at the conference, and were friendly, but were not roommates
*
