JAMES DICKEY
ADULTERY
We have all been in rooms
We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.
Often Indians are standing eagle armed on hills
In the sunrise open wide to the Great Spirit
Or gliding in canoes or cattle are browsing on the walls
Far away gazing down with the eyes of our children
Not far away or there are men driving
The last railspike, which has turned
Gold in their hands. Gigantic forepleasure lives
Among such scenes, and we are alone with it
At last. There is always some weeping
Between us and someone is always checking
A wrist watch by the bed to see how much
Longer we have left. Nothing can come
Of this nothing can come
Of us: of me with my grim techniques
Or you who have sealed your womb
With a ring of convulsive rubber:
Although we come together,
Nothing will come of us. But we would not give
It up, for death is beaten
By praying Indians by distant cows historical
Hammers by hazardous meetings that bridge
A continent. One could never die here
Never die never die
While crying. My lover, my dear one
I will see you next week
When I'm in town. I will call you
If I can. Please get hold of please don't
Oh God, Please don't any more I can't bear ... Listen:
We have done it again we are
Still living. Sit up and smile,
God bless you. Guilt is magical.

[Note: the spaces in the poem are part of the orginal.]
James Dickey
James Dickey was born in a suburb of Atlanta on February 2, 1923. His interest in poetry was awakened by his father, a lawyer who used to read his son famous speeches to the jury. As a boy Dickey read Byron, and later, a volume of Byron's poetry was the the young poet's first purchase. Already tall—six feet three inches—as a boy, he became a high school football star. Dickey attended Clemson College in South Carolina in 1942, but left after a year to enlist in the Air Force. In between combat missions in the Pacific, he read Conrad Aiken and an anthology of modern poetry by Louis Untermeyer, and developed a taste for the apocalyptic poets, including Dylan Thomas and Kenneth
Patchen.
When he returned from the war, Dickey enrolled in Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he studied anthropology, astronomy, philosophy, and foreign languages as well as
English literature. A professor, Monroe K. Spears, encouraged Dickey to write more poetry, and as a senior Dickey had a poem published in the Sewanee Review. Determined to write, he pursued graduate work, first at Vanderbilt, then at Rice University in Texas.
The Air Force recalled Dickey to train officers for the Korean War. On his return he took a position with the University of Florida, where a dispute arose over the propriety of a poem he read to a group. He abruptly resigned in April 1956 and went to New York at the age of thirty-three, where McCann-Ericson soon hired him to write advertising copy.
He stayed in New York for several years before moving to Atlanta agencies. In 1961
Dickey gave up the work to accept a Guggenheim Fellowship and spend a year in Italy with his family. Two of his most famous volumes of verse, Helmets (1964) and
Buckdancer's Choice—for which he was awarded the National Book Award in 1965— were published soon afterward. Dickey then taught, lectured, and wrote. From 1966 to
1968 he held the position of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, an office that would later become the Poet Laureate. In 1970 he penned his best-selling novel,
Deliverance. The book, which was later made into a major motion picture, exposed readers to scenes of violence and nightmarish horror, much as his poetry had done. In
1977 Dickey read at President Carter's inauguration, and later served as judge of the Yale
Younger Poets series.
By the end of his life, Dickey had gained fame for his poems and stories of the South and recognition for his Renaissance lifestyle. A writer, guitar player, hunter, woodsman, and war hero, James Dickey died in South Carolina after a long illness in 1997.
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The Lover
By Reetika Vazirani
New Delhi, 1965
I took the train from Patiala, left the girls with Ayah, and lied,
I'm with Faye and Daisy.
Had to say what he'd approve of.
Go then, Kiran said, crushing large rupees in my hand.
Have I been here a week?
I've slept so long I can't remember who was with me last night in bed, that figure leaning against the door?
Did he leave me this gold bangle?
I can feel its heft around my wrist, knobs and crests, a design from the high Mogul period of Aurangazeb.
I have come to Delhi to remember our ancient past -- so little, a bangle,
what else?
When it slid over my hand,
I opened myself like a book and you hear its private pulsing.
In the quiet he said, Put your hand here
to save your place.
I put my hand there, and he pressed it.
He sat with me a minute, and he went away, left something to hinge me in the wind of myself, to calm my legs.
Empire is large land and I can't touch it.
A smile is a root my mother said don't bother.
I am small. I married a dark talent from a small world.
Until he asked me to drop my shawl and slid his finger on my shoulder, let me taste our leisure.
I read him. I peeled back lies.
I had harped on grandeur, but the Taj Mahal and Rome are a fantasy.
What's left is my darkness. He spoke to me of skin and I touched it.
Until he asked me to drop my shawl and slid his finger on my shoulder,
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let me taste our leisure.
It required my defiance of the small world.
He asked would you, and I said I would.
I read him. I drank up my history and peeled back the glossy lies.
I had harped on former grandeur, but the Taj Mahal and Rome are a fantasy.
What's left is my darkness. He spoke to me simply of skin and I touched it.
For so many years I kept my mantra: they are great and I am small.
I've slept. I've tasted my own milk.
I'll raise my girls, then I'll be back to taste the morning.
[Notes: Bangle: "a stiff usually ornamental bracelet or anklet slipped or clasped on."
Aurangazeb, 1658 C.E. - 1707 C.E. (I found this on the Internet): Aurangzeb considered himself "The Scourge Of The Kafirs" (non-believers) and closed Hindu schools and libraries. In his lifetime he destroyed more than 10,000 Hindu, Buddhist and Jam temples and often erected mosques in their stead. In 1669 in Agra he had hacked off the limbs of the recalcitrant Hindu King Gokla and in 1672 several thousand revolting Hindus were slaughtered in Mewat.]
This poem first appeared in Callaloo, Fall 1999.
Reetika Vazirani: Recipient of a 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her second book,
World Hotel (Copper Canyon, 2002), and a Barnard New Women Poets Prize for White
Elephants (1996), Reetika Vazirani was educated at Wellesley College and received her
M.F.A. from the University of Virginia where she was a Hoyns Fellow. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Best American Poetry 2000, The Kenyon Review, Literary Review,
Meridian, The Nation, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and others.
Born in India in 1962 and raised in Maryland, she had served as writer-in-residence at
The College of William and Mary and part of the core faculty of the Callaloo Creative
Writing Workshops. Reetika Vazirani died on July 16, 2003.
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DENISE LEVERTOV
THE WELL
At sixteen I believed the moonlight could change me if it would.
I moved my head on the pillow, even moved my bed as the moon slowly crossed the open lattice.
I wanted beauty, a dangerous gleam of steel, my body thinner, my pale face paler.
I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.
But the moon's unsmiling stare kept me awake. Mornings,
I was flushed and cross.
It was on dark nights of deep sleep that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well, and woke rested, and if not beautiful, filled with some other power.
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 24, 1923. Her father, raised a Hasidic Jew, had converted to Christianity while attending university in
Germany. By the time Denise was born he had settled in England and become an
Anglican parson. Her mother, who was Welsh, read authors such as Willa Cather, Joseph
Conrad, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy aloud to the family. Denise was educated entirely at home, and claimed to have decided to become a writer at the age of five. When she was twelve, she sent some of her poetry to T. S. Eliot, who responded with two pages of "excellent advice," and encouragement to continue writing. At age seventeen she had her first poem published, in Poetry Quarterly.
During World War II, Levertov became a civilian nurse serving in London throughout the bombings. She wrote her first book, The Double Image, while she was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. The book, released in 1946, brought her recognition as one of a group poets dubbed the "New Romantics."
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In 1947 Levertov married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer, and a year later they moved to America. They settled in New York City, spending summers in Maine. Their son Nickolai was born in 1949. She became a naturalized U. S. citizen in 1956.
After her move to the U.S., Levertov was introduced to the Transcendentalism of
Emerson and Thoreau, the formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and, in particular, the work of William Carlos Willams. Through her husband's friendship with poet Robert
Creeley, she became associated with the Black Mountain group of poets, particularly
Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, who had formed a short-lived but groundbreaking school in 1933 in North Carolina. Some of her work was published in the
1950s in the Black Mountain Review. Levertov acknowledged these influences, but disclaimed membership in any poetic school. She moved away from the fixed forms of
English practice, developing an open, experimental style. With the publication of her first
American book, Here and Now (1956), she became an important voice in the American avant-garde. Her poems of the fifties and sixties won her immediate and excited recognition, not just from peers like Creeley and Duncan, but also from the avant garde poets of an earlier generation such as Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams.
Her next book, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959), established her as one of the great American poets, and her British origins were soon forgotten. She was poetry editor of The Nation magazine in 1961 and from 1963 to 1965. During the 1960's of the
Vietnam War, activism and feminism became prominent in her poetry. During this period she produced one of her most memorable works of rage and sadness, The Sorrow Dance
(1967), which encompassed her feelings toward the war and the death of her older sister.
From 1975 to 1978, she was poetry editor of Mother Jones magazine.
Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including Freeing the
Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She was also the author of four books of prose, most recently Tesserae (1995), and translator of three volumes of poetry, among them Jean Joubert's Black Iris (1989). From 1982 to 1993, she taught at
Stanford University. She spent the last decade of her life in Seattle, Washington, during which time she published Poems 1968-1972 (1987), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), and The Sands of the Well (1996). In
December 1997, Denise Levertov died from complications of lymphoma. She was seventy-four. This Great Unknowing: Last Poems was published by New Directions in
1999.
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leaving fox so many fuckless days and nights. only the solitary fox watching my window light barks her compassion. i move away from her eyes, from the pitying brush of her tail to a new place and check for signs. so far i am the only animal. i will keep the door unlocked until something human comes.
Lucille Clifton
An African-American poet, Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Her books of poetry include Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA
Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; The Terrible Stories (1995), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Book of Light (1993); Quilting:
Poems 1987-1990 (1991); Next: New Poems (1987); Good Woman: Poems and a
Memoir 1969-1980 (1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Two-Headed
Woman (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the University of
Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize; An Ordinary Woman (1974); Good News About the
Earth (1972); and Good Times (1969). She has also written Generations: A Memoir
(1976) and more than sixteen books for children. Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial
Award, and the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award. In 1999 she was elected a
Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has served as Poet Laureate for the
State of Maryland and is currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's
College of Maryland.
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ALAN DUGAN
FOR MASTURBATION
I have allowed myself this corner and am God.
Here in the must beneath their stoop
I will do as I will, either as act as act, or dream for the sake of dreams, and if they find me out in rocket ships or jets working to get away, then let my left great-toe- nail grow into the inside knob of my right ankle bone and let my fingernails make eight new moons temporarily in the cold salt marshes of my palms!
THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, and if it is "a terrible disgrace" it is as I must will, because I am not them though I am theirs to kill.
["must": musk; or, mold or mildew]
Alan Dugan
Alan Dugan was born February 12, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in
Jamaica, Queens. He began his undergraduate education at Queens College in 1941, but after two years he was drafted into the Army Air Forces. He resumed his studies at Olivet
College and received a B.A. from Mexico City College in 1949. For the next ten years,
Dugan held various jobs in advertising, publishing and medical supply in New York City while he began his career as a poet. Dugan's volumes of poetry include Poems Seven:
New and Complete Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2001), winner of the National Book
Award; Poems Six (1989); Poems Five: New and Collected Poems (1983), Poems 4
(1974); Collected Poems (1969); Poems 3 (1967); Poems 2 (1963); and Poems (1961), selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He has also received the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine, the
Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Dugan died of pneumonia on
September 3, 2003.
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DONALD JUSTICE
MEN AT FORTY
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
Donald Justice
Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. A graduate of the University of
Miami, he attended the universities of North Carolina, Stanford, and Iowa. His books include New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); A Donald Justice Reader
(1991); The Sunset Maker (1987), a collection of poems, stories and a memoir; Selected
Poems (1979), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize; Departures (1973); Night Light
(1967); and The Summer Anniversaries (1959), which received the Academy's Lamont
Poetry Selection. He has held teaching positions at Syracuse University, the University of
California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa, and from 1982 until his retirement in 1992, he taught at the University of
Florida, Gainesville. He won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991 and has received grants in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Arts. He served as a Chancellor of The Academy of
American Poets from 1997 to 2003. He lives with his wife, Jean Ross, in Iowa City.
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