
and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
in 1966.
Dickey was born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgia
where he attended North Fulton High School
in Atlanta's Buckhead
neighborhood. In 1942 he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina
and played on the football team as a tailback. After one semester, he left school to enlist in the Army Air Corps.
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,Wringing the handlebar for speed,Wild to be wreckage forever.
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earthBetween his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,To demonstrate its supplenessOf veins, as he perfected his role.
It was something like loveFrom another world that seized herFrom behind, and she gave, not lifting her headOut of dew, without ever looking, her bestSelf to that great need.
I saw for a blazing momentThe great grassy world from both sides,Man and beast in the round of their need.
I have just come down from my father.Higher and higher he liesAbove me in a blue lightShed by a tinted window.
With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throatThe undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be somethingThat no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.
She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it loseAnd gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring upIts local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs.
Here they are. The soft eyes open.If they have lived in a woodIt is a wood.If they have lived on plainsIt is grass rollingUnder their feet forever.
These hunt, as they have doneBut with claws and teeth grown perfect,More deadly than they can believe.
Those that are huntedKnow this as their life,Their reward: to walkUnder such trees in full knowledgeOf what is in glory above them,And to feel no fear.
and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
in 1966.
Early years
Dickey was born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgiawhere he attended North Fulton High School
in Atlanta's Buckhead
neighborhood. In 1942 he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina
and played on the football team as a tailback. After one semester, he left school to enlist in the Army Air Corps. Dickey served with the U.S. Army Air Forces as a radar operator in a night fighter
squadron during the Second World War, and in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. Between the wars he attended Vanderbilt University
, graduating with degrees in English and philosophy, as well as minoring in astronomy. He also taught at the University of Florida.
Career
From 1950 to 1954, Dickey taught at Rice University(then Rice Institute) in Houston. While teaching freshman composition at Rice, Dickey returned for a two-year air force stint in Korea, and went back to teaching. (Norton Anthology, The Literature of the American South, 809) He then worked for several years in advertising, most notably writing copy and helping direct creative work on the Coca-Cola and Lay's Potato Chips campaign. He once said he embarked on his advertising career in order to "make some bucks." Dickey also said "I was selling my soul to the devil all day...and trying to buy it back at night".
He returned to poetry in 1960, and his first book, "Into the Stone and Other Poems", was published in 1960 and "Drowning with Others" was published in 1962, which led to a Guggenheim fellowship (Norton Anthology, The Literature of the American South) Buckdancer's Choice
earned him a National Book Award
in 1965. Among his better known poems are "The Performance", "Cherrylog Road", "The Firebombing", "May Day Sermon", "Falling", and "For The Last Wolverine".
After being named a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress, he published his first volume of collected poems, "Poems 1957-1967" in 1967. This publishing may represent Dickey's best work—and he accepted a position of Professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.
His popularity exploded after the film version
of his novel Deliverance
was released in 1972. Dickey had a cameo in the film as a sheriff.
The poet was invited to read his poem "The Strength of Fields" at President
Jimmy Carter
's inauguration in 1977.
Personal life
In November 1948 he married Maxine Syerson, and three years later they had their first son, Christopher; a second son, Kevin, was born in 1958. Two months after Maxine died in 1976, Dickey married Deborah Dodson. Their daughter, Bronwen, was born in 1981. Christopher is a novelist and journalist, lately providing coverage from the Middle East for Newsweek
. In 1998, Christopher wrote a book about his father and Christopher's own sometimes troubled relationship with him, titled Summer of Deliverance. Kevin is a radiologist and lives in New England
. Bronwen is currently a writer in New York City.
James Dickey died on January 19, 1997, six days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1968 he taught as poet-in-residence. Dickey spent his last years in and out of hospitals, afflicted first with jaundice
and later fibrosis
of the lungs. He also suffered from alcoholism.
Works
- Into the Stone and Other Poems (1960)
- Drowning with Others (1962)
- Two Poems of the Air (1964)
- Helmets (1964)
- Buckdancer's Choice (1965)
- Poems 1957-67 (1967)
- The Achievement of James Dickey: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems (1968)
- The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970)
- DeliveranceDeliverance (novel)Deliverance is a 1970 novel by James Dickey, his first. It was adapted into a 1972 film by director John Boorman. In 1998, the editors of the Modern Library selected Deliverance as #42 on their list of the 100 best 20th-Century novels...
(1970) - Exchanges (1971)
- The Zodiac (1976)
- Veteran Birth: The Gadfly Poems 1947-49 (1978)
- Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations from the unEnglish (1979)
- The Strength of Fields (1979)
- Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (1981)
- The Early Motion (1981)
- Puella (1982)
- Värmland (1982)
- False Youth: Four Seasons (1983)
- For a Time and Place (1983)
- Intervisions (1983)
- The Central Motion: Poems 1968-79 (1983)
- Bronwen, The Traw, and the Shape-Shifter: A Poem in Four Parts (1986)
- The Eagle's Mile (1990)
- The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1949-92 (1992)
- Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like the Bee
- To The White Sea (1993)
External links
- James Dickey Newsletter & Society
- The James Dickey Page
- CNN Audio Clips with James Dickey
- James Dickey - Brief biography and a Bibliography of his published work
- The James Dickey Library at the University of South Carolina
- The James Dickey Papers at Washington University in St. Louis
- New Georgia Encyclopedia
- David Martin, "To My Cousin on James Dickey"
- Bronwen Dickey on her father's legacy
- Modern American Poetry
- Academy of American Poets, biography
- "Deliverance: A Dark Heart Still Beating - The Novel Turns 40" by Dwight Garner in The New York Times