All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman

All-American Poem
by Matthew Dickman
American Poetry Review
(2008)

All-American Poem is the first full-length collection from a remarkable young writer. The work in this collection is gutsy, sexy, big-hearted, ecstatic. Perhaps the most striking quality of this book is the broad, sweeping, and undeniably American voice that emerges to act as a 21st-century Virgil for the reader. This voice takes us through a fiercely imagined, decadent American empire, a landscape riddled with images of single mothers, shopping malls, white supremacists, public parks, Disney World, Jay-Z, sexual encounters, and working-class strife. Quick comparisons might bring up names such as Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Stern, Frank O'Hara, or Walt Whitman. But comparisons often indicate an imitation rather than a creation, and All-American Poem certainly falls into the latter category. Here are two of the book's shorter poems (many of the pieces in this volume fill several pages):



ROMA


Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened,
you know, the way bodies do
after spending the afternoon having sex
on an old couch while responsible people are suffering
with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries.
He had that look vegetables get
in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren't just red
they're goddamn red!
He was like that. Like a glowing, off-the-vine Roma
sitting in his living room picking pineapple off a Hawaiian
XXXXpizza
and telling me about his father who was a real mother
fucker. I ask him if he still loved his dad, or if he loved him
XXXXmore
now that he is dead. Sure, he says, I love anything that's dead.
Someone's hand floats up onto the beach
while the body is still lost below the current, a vase of lilacs
turned brown, the black archipelago of mourners marching
up the hill. My neighbor is there to greet each of them
with a box of chocolates and a barbershop quartet in the
XXXXbackground.
When my father died, he says opening a beer, he was no longer
my father. He was no longer a man. It's easy to love things
when they're powerless, like children and goldfish.
This is the way with enlightened people. The say things
that are so infuriatingly simple when the world is not.
So I put down my Pepsi and pull out the big card.
What about Hitler? I ask. You can't love Hitler.
My neighbor puts a piece of pineapple on his tongue like a
XXXXsacrament,
sucks the juice out of it, chews it up, then turns
his head slow like a cloud and says I can love anybody I feel
XXXXlike loving.
And I say that's ridiculous.
And he says what's ridiculous is that you don't. And there he
XXXXis again,
shining in the grocery store, pulling the bow off
the heart-shaped candies and putting one softly into his
XXXXfather's mouth.



LENTS DISTRICT


Whenever I return a fight breaks out
in the park, someone buys a lottery ticket,
steals a bottle of vodka, lights
a cigarette underneath the overpass.
205 rips the neighborhood in half
the way the Willamette rips the city in half.
It sounds like the ocean
if I am sitting alone in the back yard
looking up at the lilac.
This is where white kids lived
and listened to Black Sabbath
while they beat the shit out of each other
for bragging rights,
running in packs, carrying baseball bats
that were cut from the same trees
our parents planted
before the Asian kids moved in
to run the mini-marts
and carry knives to school, before the Mexicans
moved in and mowed everyone's front yard--
white kids wanting anything
anybody ever took from them in shaved heads
and combat boots.
On the weekend our furious mothers
applied their lipstick
that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds
and our fathers quietly did whatever
fathers do when trying to keep the dogs of sorrow
from tearing them limb from limb.
Lents, I have been away so long
I imagine that you're a musical
some rich kid from New York wrote about debt,
then threw in Kook-Aid
to make it funny. I can see the dance line,
the high kicks from the skinheads, twirling
metal pipes, stomping in unison
while the committed rage of the Gypsy Jokers
squares off with the committed rage
of the single mothers.
In the end someone gets evicted, someone
gets jumped into his new family
and they call themselves Los Brazos,
King Cobras, South-Side White Pride.
Dear Lents, dear 82nd Avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,
I am your strange son.
You saved me when I needed saving,
your arms wrapped around
my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around
the school yard
the night Jason went crazy--
waving his father's gun above his head,
bathed in red and blue flashing lights,
all-American, broken in half and beautiful.



Dickman's is the 11th volume in the American Poetry Review's Honickman First Book Prize series (All-American Poem was selected by Tony Hoagland), which is distributed through Copper Canyon Press. If you're like us, then you'll delight in the fact that All-American Poem is issued in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. The hardcover has a print run of 200, so don't snooze. Kudos to APR for keeping the hardcover alive! If you like what you've read, then you're in luck. Dickman's first collection, Amigos, was published in 2007 by Q Ave Press in an edition of 100 letterpress copies. His second collection, Something About a Black Scarf, was published in the spring of 2008 by the newly-revitalized Azul Editions. Amigos contains 10 poems, two of which are not in All-American Poem, and Something About a Black Scarf contains 17 poems, none of which appear in All-American Poem. Unfortunately, Q Ave Press does not have a website, so you may have to rely upon a bit of luck in finding Amigos. Something about a Black Scarf is easy to score--it sells at the Azul site for 8 dollars (which includes shipping).

It's only appropriate to close this review with the final sentence from William Carlos Williams's introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems:

Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.



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