I know a man who
loves tanks so much
he wishes he had
one
to pick up the
groceries, drive
his wife to work,
drop his daughter off
at school with her
Little Mermaid
lunch box, a note
hidden inside,
next to the apple, folded
with a love that
can be translated into any language: I hope
you do not suffer.
– Matthew Dickman, “Love”
Like most writers, I frequently revise the bio published alongside my work. Often this is merely to update publishing credits--switching out one journal for another, updating job titles--but sometimes the edits reflect a new understanding of identity. This is the case with the way I describe disability in my bio and with which family members get mentioned. It is also the place where I have played out my inner turmoil over identifying as a “poet.” At first, my bio stated that I was a teacher. Then, a “teacher who writes poetry.” It was not until this past year, after over a decade of writing and publishing poetry, that I felt comfortable identifying myself as a poet. This reluctance was based, in large part, on my early experiences with poetry.
Most middle and high school teachers teach poetry like they hate it, like the mandatory poetry unit is the one thing standing in the way of them teaching To Kill a Mockingbird for the 37th year in a row. My middle school teachers gave us Shakespeare, Donne, and Longfellow (texts written as recently as the 1880’s!) and despaired at our disinterest. We were taught to micro-analyze every word of every line, to wring the poor poems for every last drop of “meaning.” There were supposedly correct answers about what each poem meant, and we were taught to navigate our way toward them like children completing the “one-route-only” maze on the back of a cereal box.
It should not be a surprise, then, that I came out of school with the idea that it was not possible (or desirable) to be a poet. People had been poets, of course, in the past, but they weren’t any more. In order to be a poet, you had to be like the only examples I had been given in school. You had to live in Europe, to summer in Vienna, to write airy, inaccessible lines about mountain ranges I had never heard of. In other words, a poet was not something that someone could just be, especially not a girl from an Alaskan island who had only ever been as far as Seattle. Yet just last week, when asked what kind of writer I am, I replied without hesitation that I am a poet, and I did that because of the first real poet I met: Matthew Dickman.
My first exposure to reading and writing contemporary poetry was in my junior year of college. I enrolled in a poetry workshop as part of my thesis, in an attempt to access what I assumed would be an “easier” creative writing thesis track. I did not intend to become a poet, I just wanted less homework. The weekend before the start of the semester, on a still mostly empty campus, I decided I might as well get started on reading the texts assigned for the course. I opened Matthew Dickman’s All American Poem, and the first poem, “The Mysterious Human Heart,” pulled me in with the line “the albino/asparagus wrapped in damp paper towels, their tips/like the spark of a match.”
I can see myself almost perfectly, still. Sitting in the narrow desk chair of my dorm room, suitcases and boxes still mostly unpacked, early afternoon light coming in through the window. I read All American Poem in one go, swallowing the words as if they were necessary, sustenance. When I reached the last line of the last poem, “It’s not the world/with its ten-zillion things we should be grasping./but the sincerity of penguins, the mess we made of the roses.” I rocked back in the chair and took a breath, what felt like the first in hours. I think I laughed. Then, I flipped back to the first page of the book and read it through all over again.
***
Matthew Dickman is a poet from South Portland. He’s published four full length collections, most recently this year’s Husbandry. His early poetry--the work I first encountered in that quiet dorm room--is classic free verse. The poems lack stanza breaks, leading the reader without pause through their broad, wandering digressions and associations. Although he lives and works on the opposite coast, Dickman’s poems feel like they are in the lineage of Frank O’Hara and the New York School.
As a Portland writer, Dickman has worked to make poetry more accessible to people who might not seek it out. In his time as poetry editor for Tin House he started the “Share a Poem” program, in which people mail books of poetry to someone who doesn’t often read the genre. He also teaches at the Attic Institute, an organization that offers writing workshops and courses at more accessible prices than traditional organizations. This push to make poetry accessible to a broader audience is in keeping with Dickman’s own poetry, which lays open complex themes and emotions for readers.
The language in Dickman’s poetry was different from anything I had been given to read in school. I didn’t have to look up any of the words, I didn’t have to read or re-read the sentences to parse the syntax. This is not to over simplify the writing. One of the appeals of Dickman’s poetry is his ability to make comparisons that no one else ever would have thought of, but that feel perfect and instantly understandable. His poems take sudden turns from minute details to universal ideas in the space of a few lines. The poems did things that, at the time, I didn’t understand at all. I just knew they felt more right than any poems I had read previously.
What was especially unique, to me, was that here was a Poet who was unlike the capital P Poets I had been given to read in school. The poet was living, first and foremost. Living, walking and writing about the same streets I was walking. A poet who came from a working class family like the families whose children I worked with in South Portland classrooms. Poetry seemed, in these pages, attainable for the first time.
Dickman’s book was the clear favorite in our poetry workshop, possibly the only collection that had actually been read by all participants when it came time for discussion. We were ecstatic when Dr. Asarnow announced that Dickman himself had graciously agreed to come speak with us later in the semester about his book. The day of the workshop, I remember wondering what a real poet would look like. Still internalizing the poets of my youth, I pictured a lithograph of John Keats, flowing, curled hair pushed back from the brow, ruffled shirt tucked carelessly into suspendered pants.
Instead, the man who came through the door was...a person. A normal person, wearing jeans and a tshirt. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the small, imperceptible seed that was planted in that moment. Previously, I had assumed that Poets were historical, possibly supernatural beings. Seeing a poet in person, as a real person, presented the idea that it might be something one could be. Here was an ordinary person who was also a poet. I was an ordinary person. Could I be a poet too?
I do not remember whether Dr. Asarnow, asked us to prepare questions ahead of time. Perhaps he did, or perhaps he assumed that our enthusiasm for the text would carry over into intelligent questions about a work dense with universal themes of grief and desire, of masculinity and family connection. That was not the case. There were the tired, “What is your writing process like?” and “How do you get to be a writer,” and the exhausted “Where do your ideas come from?”
Over a decade later, I cannot recall with any accuracy what Dickman said in response to our questions. I remember that he was generous and warm with his responses, even to the young lady who asked an incredibly invasive question about whether Dickman preferred to write poems before sex, or immediately after. I remember that he was funny, that he emphasized the ways in which writing can and should exist alongside other normal life activities (work, family, etc.) Most of all, I remember him feeling relatable. Possible.
I say all of this not to undermine the talent and hard work that Dickman puts into his poetry. In the years since, I have had the opportunity to see him read, and to take one of the workshops he offers at The Attic Institute. Hearing him talk about craft, about his own choices and the choices of other authors, is a clear demonstration of someone who has read deeply and widely, and who is intentional about their own writing.
All of that came later, though. Sitting in that workshop circle, listening to Dickman talk about his own work, what I remember most is the feeling of a new path opening before me. Previously, I would have put “poet” on the same list of “technically real but practically unattainable jobs” right after astronaut and president. Yet here was someone talking about writing poetry between shifts at a grocery store, as if poetry was yet another routine part of life, albeit a beautiful and mysterious one.
In the twelve years since that workshop I have been published in numerous literary journals, both online and in print. I’ve placed in contests, been invited to participate in readings, and taken on editorial roles. I have one published chapbook, and another coming out this year. When I am published, the first line of my bio says, “Frances Klein is a poet.” It’s right there. I’m a poet. I don’t look like John Keats, or summer in the Alps. Yet, because of this opportunity to see my first real poet, to see a way of being a poet outside the model I had been given in my early schooling, I know I am a poet.
