James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickeywas an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. Dickey was also a novelist, known for Deliverancewhich was adapted into an acclaimed film of the same name...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 February 1923
CityAtlanta, GA
guilt sometimes feels
To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.
writing dresses wells
If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.
sex feelings intimacy
The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity....
suicide frustration artist
We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.
tired kind
There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.
editors our-time
William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.
fine hunches bounds
You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.
want dueling welcome
I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
fire way sometimes
To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.
want fever quiet
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
want failing willing
What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.
storm lucky six
A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.
occupation may poetry-is
Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
frost pieces toilets
If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular piece of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.