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Flies
Michael Dickman
Copper Canyon Press
78 pages, $16.00, paperback
www.coppercanyonpress.com

Pairs well with: Champagne in a Cheers mugs.

I get it. There are probably reasons for the grammar-less, line smattering that is “Flies.” I can almost defend it. With the boy-speak of superheroes and masturbating classics it almost fits. After tying cherry stems with a tongue and “at the end of one billion light-years” the lack of commas, periods, and intentional line breaks almost make sense. Almost.

But I have to remember that this is not an adolescent boy writing, this is a poet. In good poetry, the line break matters. The line break defines the poem, it makes the language matter. It takes a thought and turns it into an idea that matters to the reader.

Pushing ‘return’ on the keyboard or picking up a pen and moving it down a line matters in the same way that → framing matters in a photograph. The edges a photographer chooses matter, it colors all the viewer sees and how they interpret the photograph.→ Diane Arbus’ photography contains some of the same edge of grit that Dickman revels in, but she frames the ‘freak’ in an intentionally eerie way. The edges of her square photographs contain the subject and enough of their environment to ground them for the viewer, but not so much as to take away from the focus. The edges of poetry are line endings and beginnings and Dickman has not yet mastered the power they hold.

To explore why the line break is important I will return to a book I read early on in my literary studies, The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinksy. In this beautiful little book Pinsky asks, more eloquently than I could, “What is a line of poetry? To put the question more precisely, what vocal reality underlies the typographical convention of stopping at the right margin and returning to the left margin?”

I would argue that lines make language sing. The forced pauses in language –

make poetry. They leave room for reasoning, reflection, and anticipation – like a short silence in music (the brief pause in Handel’s Messiah before the pounding climax). Unfortunately for Dickman, he left a lot of time for reasoning and reflection with his superfluous line breaks and what I found in that time was empty repetition, vain attempts at importance, and disintegrating images. As it turns out, there was nothing after the anticipation brought by a line end. Classical pianist Artur Schnabel said, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides!” Dickman would do well to work on his pauses (read: line ends, beginnings, and the lovely comma and period) so that he may handle his art, poetry, better than a teenager writing in the void of his dank room.

While examining “My Picture Left in Scotland,” Pinsky says “the lines do unmistakably have a certain rhythm in common, an artful coherence: part of the pleasure the poem gives is hearing that rhythm while the sentence courses over it, or through it, or along with it, or whatever spatial language you like to describe the way we hear the sentence-sound.” Even painting employs rhythm. Good abstract paintings harness the power of pause for rhythm’s sake, they allow for the feeling to move over, through, and along the surface of the painting.→ Franz Kline demonstrates this beautifully in his moving black and white pieces. Kline made a point of being intentional in his paintings and acknowledged that he “paint[s] the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” There is pleasure in the practiced spontaneity of his gestural abstraction. He provides room and movement for the viewer to become involved with his work.

All pleasure derived from Dickman’s poems must be found apart from the rhythm because there is no cadence to the uneven lines, no ebb or flow to the way it sounds when read aloud. In poetry so much pleasure can be derived from the dance battle of syntax and line, but with Dickman there is no tension between the syntax and the line. What is juvenile in the tone, diction, vocabulary is also juvenile in the rushed, uneven, scattered lines. Without meaningful line breaks the poems fall apart and become a random smattering of adolescent thoughts. Dickman doesn’t do any of the work of directing the reader to think deeply about anything, but his “exuberant surrealism” seems to point toward the abstract and shrug at the reader saying, “you figure it out, even if there is nothing there.” With more structured line breaks and grammar Dickman could make the poems sing a song that means something. But in “Flies” closing lines like these from “All Saints”:

you peed

A halo

seeping into the rug (32)

feign importance by breaking down a childhood story into terse lines that mimic the tension Pinsky references, but upon further inspection it is still a childhood story.

The diction and thought process are often confusing – as they should be, for after all, they are the meanderings of the mind of a manchild – but what footing we lose there should be made up in the traction of line breaks and grammar. Give me something to stand on! I would love to focus on the brilliant images or the way the flies thread their way through these poems (only by walking or serving food, of course), but I cannot get beyond the fact that Dickman is not a teenager, but an adult poet, reflecting. (And that may say something about me. I’m okay with that. I get stuck on things and obsess over small flaws to the detriment of every beautiful thing around me.)

Let me try for a moment to find a place in this collection to settle for a minute, to take a deep breath and enjoy it. Ah, yes, here. Just about smack in the middle of the book, the poem “Stations” (37). Here, the singular lines set apart by white space actually work. The list-effect of this 14-section poem is entrancing. From the “white paper swans the color of disappearing” to the “cancer in children” there are moments that tremble and turn in my mind. (Notice, I ignore the heart floating in piss, this conversation has been done before.) The line breaks that I dislike in the rest of the book seem at home in this long poem. They match the quick pulses that come at the reader through image one after the other and slow them down by extending the line. Much of this poem contains the tension of a tango (by the way, this is the sexiest tango ever) between syntax and line. But then there are the poems before and after it.

Just as the clipped lines I mention above from “All Saints” create a false sense of importance, the random lengthy lines cause pause. Take for instance this section from “Be More Beautiful”:

My body dreams of meat

It stinks and

Sings

I dress it carefully and stick new Band-Aids on and take it outside so it can see and be in love

I hang it up on a hook

on a moon

to turn in slow circles

Open all night

Are you open all night?

I’m open all night (8)

The fourth line jumps from a one-syllable line to a 25-syllable line. This causes the reader to stop and take notice. But for what reason? None. The 25-syllable line means nothing more or less than the lines surrounding it. This is not a rush of emotion or a philosophical revelation, but a line without craft. There doesn’t seem to be a poet behind the line. And it’s a shame. I would love to cheer a poet who can reference a shitting, masturbating Emily Dickinson in the same book with his super hero brother who has died and a never-ending crowd of flies buzzing about.

Dickman is a risk taker. But he walks to the edge of his cliff-like lines and jumps without thinking about what comes next or what came before. Without grammar and intentional line breaks, “Flies” is a grown man’s scratched thoughts about his younger self, unedited, straight from journal page to poems “set in Janson” and “printed on archival-quality paper at McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.” – a lot of pomp and circumstance for an angst-ridden teenage boy, I mean, poet-man.