The Poet as Journalist

Two years ago, Poet James Dickey, whose Buckdancer's Choice won the 1966 National Book Award for Poetry received a letter from a friend who had visited a home for blind children and watched as they smashed their fists against their eyes to produce a momentary shock of light. Their agony tormented him so much that he wrote, in the November Harper's, a brilliantly brooding poetic fantasy, The Eye-Beaters. It was made particularly jolting because of Dickey's marginal notations, written with the stark understatement of a wire-service reporter. "A therapist explains why the children strike their eyes," the note explains as fact. Then:

They know they should see.

But what, now? When their fists smash their eyeballs, they behold no

Stranger giving light from his palms.

What they glimpse has flared

In mankind from the beginning. In the asylum, children turn to go back

Into the race: turn their heads without comment into the black magic

Migraine of caves. Smudge-eyed, wide-eyed, gouged, horned, caved-in, they are silent: it is for you to guess what they hold back inside.

Some poetry purists criticized Dickey for using a journalistic device to clarify the poem's meaning. As precedent, Dickey cites the notations in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Says Dickey: "I had to make a choice, and I chose to give the reader a better sense of continuity. I don't see why there always has to be a barrier between art and journalism. Journalism can be a great vehicle for a true poetic vision."

On his first journalistic assignment Dickey covered the Apollo 7 blast-off for LIFE. While other reporters filed millions of words on the event's scientific and political import, the prolific poet (six collections in the last eight years) turned instead to the human drama: as they plunge with all of us--up

from the flame-trench, up from the Launch

Umbilical Tower, up from the elk and the butterfly up from

the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds

of wives into the universal cavern into the mathematical abyss, to find us--and return,

to tell us what we will be.

Dickey accepted the assignment because the astronauts have a deep sig -nificance for him. "Americans have sunk into the sloth of more and more comfort and convenience," he says. "Many want to give up and see life as essentially miserable. I see life as hardly explored yet. These space guys are showing that miracles can still happen. I was born believing in great efforts."

As a youth in Atlanta, Dickey's ef forts were mostly in outdoor sports and music. He still considers the north Georgia hills his "spiritual ground. My people are all hillbillies. I'm only second-generation city," he drawls. During World War II, he was a combat flier on some 100 missions in Black Widow night fighters over the Pacific. He later wrote about this experience in his poem, The Firebombing:

Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the

cockpit And some technical-minded stranger

with my hands Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light, Having potential fire under the un-deodorized arms

Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles, The "tear-drop-shaped" 300-gallon

drop-tanks

Filled with napalm and gasoline.

The napalm and gasoline of the war over, Dickey enrolled at Vanderbilt to study philosophy and English. After teaching English at Rice and the University of Florida, he became an advertising copywriter in New York, then in Atlanta. In August 1961, to devote himself to poetry, he quit his job and supported his wife and two sons on small family savings and welfare checks. Six months later, they left for a year in Europe, courtesy of a $5,000 Guggenheim fellowship. Temporary terms as poet-in-residence at Reed, San Fernando Valley State and Wisconsin, and as successor to Stephen Spender as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, have occupied him since.

Now, at 45, back in the South as Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, the former football star is having difficulty deciding whether to accept an offer to train with an N.F.L. team to write about his experiences. "I'm resisting the whirlwind of journalism," he says. "If I've finally achieved any distinction as a poet, then my primary aim is to explore the paths I've so laboriously come on. I've been looking forward for years just to sitting down and writing poems." Dickey has already proved that being a fine poet and a first-rate journalist are not mutually exclusive.

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