Michael Dickman
Award-winning Poet
"Reading Michael [Dickman] is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind." —The New Yorker
“Reading into Michael Dickman's book is like drinking from the well and the water from that well comes from deep in the earth. Spare, clear, untranslatable poems—spoken as if out of the original silence. How, living as he does, in the 21st century, can Michael Dickman be so still, within himself, as to hear that?” —Marie Howe
Michael Dickman began writing poems "after accidentally reading a Neruda ode." His first collection is The End of the West (2009) from Copper Canyon Press. A brilliant debut, his poetry breathes in the entire world, it's delights, cruelty, boredom, and griefs, and breathes out a prayer, one that holds both grace and suffering, equally, lightly. "There is only this world and this world // What a relief / created // over and over." Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a "style like no one else's" and elucidates, "With the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Michael Dickman's poems give a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys which bind together the vast human family." His second book of poetry is entitled Flies (Copper Canyon, May 2011). The book was chosen by poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Major Jackson, and Michael Ryan to receive the 2010 James Laughlin Award, for the most outstanding second book by an American poet in the previous year.
Dickman was born and raised in the Lents neighborhood of Portland Oregon. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and he won the 2008 Narrative Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker, with his twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman. He has been awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton for 2009-2011.
The New Yorker profile featuring Michael and Matthew Dickman
About FLIES (2011)"Hilarity transfiguring all that dread, manic overflow of powerful feeling, zero at the bone—Flies renders its desolation with singular invention and focus and figuration: the making of these poems makes them exhilarating." —James Laughlin Award citation
Winner of the James Laughlin Award for the best second book by an American poet, Flies presents an uncompromising vision of joy and devastating loss through a strict economy of language and an exuberant surrealism. Michael Dickman's poems bring us back to the wonder and violence of childhood, and the desire to connect with a power greater than ourselves.
What you want to remember
of the earth
and what you end up
remembering
are often two
different things
About THE END OF THE WEST (2009)
The poems in Michael Dickman's energized debut document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times: the churn of domestic violence, spiritual longing, drug abuse, and the impossible expectations fathers have for their sons. In a poem that references heroin and "scary parents," Dickman reminds us that "Still there is a lot to pray to on earth."
