Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon.

Radar:

We read that you worked as a cook for many years.  Are cooking and writing the same for you, or do you experience these two endeavors very differently?

Dickman:

I’d say they’re the same because, in both, you’re working with material that has limits—whether it’s Brussels sprouts or the English language.  You’re making something for other people to consume, but it’s also something that you, yourself, can imagine wanting to consume.

The difference between cooking and writing is that you can’t survive on poetry alone.  I should say that cooking was a job for me and poetry has never been a job for me. Teaching poetry is a job, but writing poetry isn’t.

Radar:

We see you walking around Princeton most days.  Sometimes you’re pushing a baby carriage and sometimes you’re reading a book as you walk. What never changes is some sort of exuberant lilt in your step. Are you excited to be outside? If the answer is “yes,” can you tell us a little about what it is you’re seeing?

Dickman:

I am excited to be outside.  When we were growing up in Portland, my brother (Matthew) and I walked a lot.  We walked everywhere–from one end of the city to the other. Nowadays, when I’m pushing the baby, I often am thinking about poems. Princeton is very beautiful—the trees and the flowers—and I like to get out as early as possible and walk.

Radar:

Your book Flies packs quite a wallop. We find it exquisitely painful to read these poems and thus recognize the magnitude of your loss (upon the death of your brother). But we also get to enjoy the many delights of your childhood in these poems. Have we read this book well if we come away forever changed by what you have captured in these poems, but not exclusively happy or sad for you?

Dickman:

I hope that’s true.  I hope that the poems in Flies do not ask for your sadness or your happiness—that they don’t beg for any one reaction. I don’t think the book is therapeutic. It certainly wasn’t to write it. I would be excited if someone walked away having just one or two images from the book in his/her head.

Radar:

Our favorite aspect of this collection is the sense of wonder you create.  It’s done through tone, lightly-veiled religious references, use of white space, the high/low diction, the way you keep the reader slightly off-balance by switching between a child’s perspective and a more mature point-of-view. Does this all sound right to you? Were you purposeful in keeping the reader from settling in to a comfortable place with these poems?

Dickman:

I was aware of that, but only after the fact. I guess because I’m often off-balance myself, I was off-balance making these poems. When I was writing these poems, I had no idea what I was doing, and I still feel that way when I write. I never felt secure or safe with the material.  And the material seemed off-balance too.

Radar:

If you agree with the conclusions we've drawn in the last question, and we’re still talking about this most fascinating aspect of Flies, does the style in which these poems are written strike you as especially modern—or old-fashioned, for that matter?

Dickman:

Old-fashioned. I think of Seamus Heaney and how I am always trying to write like him.  The problems these poems concern themselves with are solved in the ways we talked about—through tone, use of white space, etc.—and if I get one image or one sound right, then I’m close. It’s the music that matters the most; I’m not concerned with tricks. I feel like a throwback in that I am doing something formally. I am trying to get close to an organic form. This might have been Keats’ idea, or someone else’s, but these poems are the result of an impulse to make a clear image that sings.

Radar:

If the idea of placing these poems on some kind of poetry timeline makes you cringe, then what can you say about the place that your work, as a whole, occupies?

Dickman:

I don’t look at my poems after they are published, and I couldn’t say where these poems fit into a contemporary moment.

Radar:

Want to look at a poem in this collection together?  We could take “An Offering” and talk about it.

Dickman:

I can remember where I was when I was working on each line. I can remember that exactly. It’s like the trashed kitchen that the poem left behind. None of the poems in Flies is trying to hide anything. You get what you get from the poem. “An Offering” doesn’t seem to me to be very giving, but it isn’t purposefully keeping things from the reader either. I’m not someone who has epiphanies in my life, so I don’t have them in my poems.

Radar:

And finally, the time-honored question all interviewers must ask: what are you reading and/or writing these days?

Dickman:

I am reading 100 Years of Solitude—along with the rest of the world—and it is great!  I just read a beautiful novel by Patrick O’Keeffe called The Visitors. I am working on a new book of poems. I hope to have a first draft done by the end of the summer. For the most part, there are no people in the new poems. They are poems about foxes, deer, trees, and sunlight. John Clare is a strong force behind this book.