James Dickey

James Lafayette Dickey was a popular American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

• Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
  Wringing the handlebar for speed,
  Wild to be wreckage forever.
  • Cherrylog Road (l. 106–108).

• 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.
  • The Performance (l. 13–16).

• 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.
  • The Sheep Child (l. 31–35).

• I saw for a blazing moment
  The great grassy world from both sides,
  Man and beast in the round of their need.
  • The Sheep Child (l. 41–43).

• I have just come down from my father.
  Higher and higher he lies
  Above me in a blue light
  Shed by a tinted window.
  • The Hospital Window (l. 1–4).

• 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.
  • Falling (l. 9–11).

• 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.
  • Falling (l. 66–68).

• 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.
  • The Heaven of Animals (l. 1–6).

• These hunt, as they have done
  But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
  More deadly than they can believe.
  • The Heaven of Animals (l. 20–22).

• 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.
  • The Heaven of Animals (l. 29–34).

Unsourced

• 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.

• 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)