Michael Dickman

At the start of my freshman year of high school, I did not know how to write. I knew that I wanted to write, and I knew that I had a lot to say, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to articulate any of it. The poem that changed all of that for me was “Killing Flies” by Michael Dickman. I stumbled upon it by chance, and I was immediately captivated. The opening lines grabbed me and pulled me into a situation that I had never come close to experiencing, but that I somehow felt incredibly connected to

 

“I sit down for dinner

with my dead brother

again

This is the last dream I ever want to have

 Passing the forks

around the table, passing

the knives

 There’s nothing to worry about”

 – Killing Flies

 These lines stunned me, and expertly conveyed grief in just a few words. This poem came at an important time for me, and showed me the way that words can affect people in a way that can’t always be explained. During freshman year, I experienced the loss of purpose that comes with being 15. I was writing all the time for school, but I didn’t really know why. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything important. After reading this poem, I understood why.

As much as I love Dickman’s craft, I can’t say that is specifically what draws me to his work. Rather, it’s the unexplainable feeling I get each time I read one of his pieces.

The most valuable advice I was ever given as a writer was that specificity is your friend. In a lot of my early writing, I was trying to be as general as possible. I wanted to write what I thought people wanted to read, and I tried to be relatable to everyone. I was a 15 year old girl pretending like I lived in New York City, or played guitar in a band, or was struggling through college. In Michael Dickman’s poems, nothing is ever general. The detail is astounding, whether he is talking about his deceased brother, his relationship with his father, or Emily Dickinson.

“You eat the forks,

all the knives, asleep and waiting

on the white tables

 What do you love?

 I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on

despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs

turning over

the earth”

– My Autopsy

These lines strike me in ways I can’t explain, but the feeling I get when I read his work resonates through me. In a way, this feeling is what I am searching for in what I read, and what I am striving to produce in what I write. Michael Dickman taught me how to speak, how to be honest about the things that it hurts to be honest about. Now, I know that I can find myself, and by extension my writing, inside his poetry.

– Meredith Abdelnour, Junior Layout and Design Editor

Inspirational Poe

As a young writer, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was completely enamored and thus shaped by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I took on a full understanding of a poem for the first time through his poem, “Alone”. I chose to interpret this poem for a speech class I had freshman year and, from the seemingly random personal connection I stumbled upon, I felt less fearful of my own emotions I deemed irrelevant or too difficult to understand. From there, I bought a full collection of his work and even wrote several pieces in his characteristically dark and dramatic manner. I believe Poe to be the reason I was able to convert my understanding of poetry from the need to rhyme to the need to express emotion that is so honest it reflects the overall human condition and allows solace in such.

The influence of Poe has carried over into my junior year of high school as well. Junior year being a year known to be targeted by college officials looking over transcripts, academics have gained the ability to encroach on my writing life. This only led to a substantial drain upon inspiration to write and, even more dramatically, a drain upon my desire to put effort into understanding my emotions enough to put them in complex, thoughtful writing. I again reconnected to Poe when we were given several copies of his pieces to read in a writing class, one of the pieces being “The Raven”. It was not until this year that I was aware of my ability to connect and find even deeper understanding in pieces due to an accumulation of past experiences since my first connection to an artist like Poe. Therefore, the meaning of Poe’s heavier works became much more complex and interesting to me. In this, Poe once again fortified my need to write.

Most memorably, the piece that I produced intentionally drawn from the work of Poe was a piece I did not submit for any classes I had. Rather, I just sat down and wrote in a notebook a poem that came from the heart instead of a prompt. It came from a connection as well as a need to sort through the complications I had been facing then. The poem was not exactly grounded in the way that Poe does, but it was honest and one of the few things I’ve crafted that I feel connected to as I know it is not something I’d want others to read. I realize that it has potential to be shared and understood, but I feel that comfort with that level of publicity of self is something i still need to work on. Again, Poe can serve as a role model for this as well. Though I’m not quite a complete expert on the actions of Poe in his mental process of publication, I still recognize that he put himself in his work and chose to put it out into the world at one point or another. I wish to follow my own footsteps, of course, but it’s always good to have a guiding inspiration to look to ahead.

– Kathryn Wallis, Junior Art Editor

The Little Things

Billy Collins has always been on of my biggest inspirations as a poet. I discovered in my freshman year of highschool and at first I didn’t really like him. Actually, I didn’t really like any poets but I remember one Christmas morning my grandpa handed me a small stack of poetry books. He told me he knew I was having trouble with my poetry and he saw these at a garage sale for a few dollars and thought they might help. Stuck in between Robert Hass and Yeats was a book by Collins. I think the cover attracted me more than the actual poetry did.

I didn’t really touch the books for about a month or so, until one day I was assigned to write about poem. Poetry was terrifying to me, I thought it was way to over my head for me to even consider being a poet. So I turned to the small stack of books that had been collecting dust silently on my desk. I reached for the Collins book and flipped through, until one poem stuck out to me. It was about yellow bathtub ducks he’d found in a drug store one night. Don’t ask me why I liked this poem so much because I wouldn’t really have an answer for you. But that one poem opened something for me. Pretty soon I started seeing the beauty in all of his poem.

The simplistic language, the beautiful imagery, the emotions I found hidden in each sentence. Collins isn’t the type of writer to write directly about his emotions. He always finds an image or an action to zone in one and he makes you feel it for yourself, instead of describing it. And I can tell you now, that for someone who hates talking about her feelings or sharing any type of personal information with stranger, this type of technique really intrigues me.

In a lot of ways Collins opened the door to the poetry world and sort made me see that not everything has to be complicated pros and metaphors that nobody understands. It was be simple, pleasant. You don’t have to rip through your emotional conscious or tear apart traumatic memories to get a good poem. Sometimes you can just write about the rain drops of a window or yellow bathtub ducks you find in a drug store.

Sometime when I’m sitting in front of my computer not being able to come up with anything, I’ll feel that fear inside of me. That fear that I’ll never be able to write poetry the way I’m “supposed” too, but Collins always finds a way to remind me that there will never be a specific way to write poetry. You write what you feel, what you see, what you experience. You write your truth.

– Sierra Lunsford, Web Editor