James Dickey (1923 – 1997)
Popular American poet and novelist.
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I don't understand how a writer could ever get writer's block, so-called. My problem is having too much...and being unable to get it down.
It appears that my presence would be most efficacious by its absence. (to the other actors on the set of Deliverance after being basked to leave)
I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need.
With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.
It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need.
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
Those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear.
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose
And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs.
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or at such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us. They don’t understand if there is any use. We are the masters of the superior secret, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write.
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