Mayakovsky's Revolver: A Double-Take On Matthew Dickman’s Latest

In my experience, the Dickman brothers and their poetry are polarizing topics amongst creative writers. Most people really do either love or hate them. I’ll admit that I was in the latter camp, – I was suspicious of the Dickman public image, which is very Portland, cool and offbeat, and this prejudice ruined what individual pieces of theirs I read or heard read aloud – until, like a critic should, I gave their work a fair chance.  When I actually read Matthew and Michaels’ poetry collections in full, I flipped.Flies won me over to Michael Dickman. Mayakovsky’s Revolver similarly convinced me of Matthew. The collection, which West 10^th reviewed earlier this month, is full of surprising language and metaphor. My favorite example occurs in The Gas Station, when Matthew encounters a gunman: “this guy came out swinging / a gun, his face like an apartment / that no one had lived in for years, / the gun pointing just above my head when it went off, …”Due to its thematic content, Matthew’s collection may not be entirely accessible on the whole. Not every reader has been threatened with a firearm. Neither have most readers lost a sibling to suicide, a narrative that runs throughout Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Regardless of how foreign some of the collection’s content may be, most of its poems are believable and engaging.This is due to the fact that the emotion behind the language feels honest. Before Mayakovsky’s Revolver, I’d unfairly assumed that Dickman’s poetry relied more on gimmick than on art and was more striking for its cool, modern voice than for its sincerity. Mayakovsky’s Revolver, for the most part, proves both assumptions wrong. The collection is consistently both artful and passionate.Only one piece, entitled Dark, made me think that perhaps my original misgivings about Dickman’s poetry, which are doubts that a lot of haters share, carried some weight. Dark occurs in Mayakovsky’s Revolver’s second section, Elegy to a Goldfish. In general, I am less enamored of this section than of the rest of the book. But, I have a definite issue with the piece Dark.Dark includes bits of different stories – a line about an abused boy, a line about a self-abusive girl – in an arc that focuses mainly on Dickman himself.  Neither the story of the abused boy nor of the self-abusive girl is developed; neither the boy nor the girl is even named. These two characters feel inauthentic, like archetypes of other people that appear in the collection; the inclusion of their stories feels gratuitous. In Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Dark presents a disappointment. It lacks cohesiveness and, I think, the emotional urgency that makes the rest of the collection so compelling.--Lauren Roberts, Managing Editor

A Review of Das Energi by Paul Williams

Sifting through second-hand paperbacks at a musty bookstore on the Upper West Side I stumbled upon Das Energi, a hippie-spiritual classic from 1974 that I’d heard my friend’s parents talk about when they would reminiscence about times when music was political and LSD was legal. It was one of those popular books that everyone eventually forgot about as the decade passed and the peace and love mentality of that generation faded into the 80s.Usually these kinds of “Feel the world, heal the world” narratives can be hard to get through, mostly because they are repetitive and almost always vague, but this one struck a somewhat different note. Paul Williams manages to weave lyrical prose with hard slang into a strong and thoughtfully structured manifesto, a mantra for a new way of living life. The structure of Das Energi follows suit, each page as varied as the voice. Some pages are run-on paragraphs, set in a conversational tone Williams asks an obscure “you” why fear is so potent, why we choose to ignore the metaphysical implications of our existence. Others are only a line, something short and thoughtful to be repeated over and over again. Though he traverses a number of topics, from guiltless sex to our obsession with efficiency to the potency of religion, the one line he refers back to constantly is: “You are God”.  Williams seems to believe that worshipping a separate and nonhuman entity is pointless and detracts from the self-evolution and discovery that is necessary to contribute to the energy flow of the world.In some ways Williams came very close to sounding like the stoned middle-aged gypsies you might bump into at Burning Man while waiting in line for beer, but it is his stylistic voice that separates him from the ‘wishy washy’ aspects of spiritual culture that mainstream society can’t seem to handle. He has a very forceful approach to his doctrine and often ends up sounding much more like Karl Marx than Gandhi. His constant reference to “shedding old skin”, “setting yourself free” and of “not seeking but finding” are dispersed between urgent didactic lines like “Here and now, boys. Or else spend infinite future fighting quarrels of endless past.” He pushes forward the importance of responsibility and even outlines three self-made laws of the economics of energy. Admittedly Williams’ inconsistency in writing is sometimes shaky—it is harder to sink into a piece that chooses not to commit to any tone or mood—but he is nevertheless an earnest and often charismatic writer with enough skill to pull off a book that could have been excruciating. His words are familiar the way an old jazz tune at a coffee store is; you know the basic melody but the vocal riffs and trumpet solo always take you buy surprise.--Michelle Ling, Art Editor

Poetry Review: Matthew Dickman's Mayakovsky's Revolver

The brothers Dickman, Matthew and Michael, found themselves thrust face-first into the world of poetry around 2009, when both had recently published their first full collections of poems from Copper Canyon Press. The two received mixed reactions to their collective worth, heralded as either a gimmick of hip, Portland poets, or as a sort of polarized harmony, where each poet’s distinctly different style pulled away from his twin’s, only to have each void filled with the other brother’s voice.With his newest collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Matthew Dickman has established himself independent of any of the gimmicks or cheap tricks. Mayakovsky’s Revolver is drenched in a sort of dark enlightenment, a world permeated with imagery that is at once visceral and hauntingly surreal. This is a world where the speaker’s third grade teacher wears  “a rosary of barbed wire underneath her white blouse,” a world where the speaker will try to pass notes to his dead brother on the day of his funeral, filled with an entire penumbra of emotion.Dickman is still jubilant, but he is also quiet, pensive. The elements and subjects of the collection are at once celebrated and mourned, as “blackberries will make the mouth of an eight-year-old look like he’s a ghost.” The poems in Mayakovsky’s Revolver take place in quiet moments, the shadows of memories that can only exist in the world of poetry. The collection laments the death of a dead brother, while embracing the life of a twin brother, staring right into the smallest of moments, and, in spite of everything, managing to find great love and great loss.--Eric Stiefel, Assistant Poetry Editor