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"The twin brother of poet Michael Dickman, poet Matthew Dickman grew up in Lents, a working-class area of Portland, Oregon. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and an MFA at the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center... Unabashed in their celebration and in their grief, Dickman’s expansive, long-lined lyric poems are layered with references to popular culture, personal history, and class-based struggle. In a 2010 interview with Brian Brodeur for the blog How a Poem Happens, Dickman stated, “I do believe in inspiration. Inspiration and meaning-making. Often they are bed partners.”
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/matthew-dickmanLive Readings
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Poems
Poems
Grief
When grief comes to you as a purple gorillayou must count yourself lucky.You must offer her what’s leftof your dinner, the book you were trying to finishyou must put asideand make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,her eyes moving from the clockto the television and back again.I am not afraid. She has been here beforeand now I can recognize her gaitas she approaches the house.Some nights, when I know she’s coming,I unlock the door, lie down on my back,and count her stepsfrom the street to the porch.Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,tells me to write downeveryone I have ever known,and we separate them between the living and the deadso she can pick each name at random.I play her favorite Willie Nelson albumbecause she misses Texasbut I don’t ask why.She hums a little,the way my brother does when he gardens.We sit for an hourwhile she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,crying in the check-out line,refusing to eat, refusing to shower,all the smoking and all the drinking.Eventually she puts one of her heavypurple arms around me, leansher head against mine,and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.So I tell her,things are feeling romantic.She pulls another name, this timefrom the dead,and turns to me in that way that parents doso you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.Romantic? she says,reading the name out loud, slowlyso I am aware of each syllable, each vowelwrapping around the bones like new muscle,the sound of that person’s bodyand how reckless it is,how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.-from All-American Poem (2008)
When grief comes to you as a purple gorillayou must count yourself lucky.You must offer her what’s leftof your dinner, the book you were trying to finishyou must put asideand make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,her eyes moving from the clockto the television and back again.I am not afraid. She has been here beforeand now I can recognize her gaitas she approaches the house.Some nights, when I know she’s coming,I unlock the door, lie down on my back,and count her stepsfrom the street to the porch.Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,tells me to write downeveryone I have ever known,and we separate them between the living and the deadso she can pick each name at random.I play her favorite Willie Nelson albumbecause she misses Texasbut I don’t ask why.She hums a little,the way my brother does when he gardens.We sit for an hourwhile she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,crying in the check-out line,refusing to eat, refusing to shower,all the smoking and all the drinking.Eventually she puts one of her heavypurple arms around me, leansher head against mine,and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.So I tell her,things are feeling romantic.She pulls another name, this timefrom the dead,and turns to me in that way that parents doso you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.Romantic? she says,reading the name out loud, slowlyso I am aware of each syllable, each vowelwrapping around the bones like new muscle,the sound of that person’s bodyand how reckless it is,how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.-from All-American Poem (2008)
Teenage Riot
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing elsemattered but to learn some new trick,to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flewoff the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twistedinto a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to runthrough the neighborhood
was to run through ittogether, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almostdon't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gumand how they smelled so differentfrom us, sitting in some kid's basement drinkinghis parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack,jumped in when some one of us got jumped,
so when a man we had never seen beforecame up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walkedover to the manlike someone walking into a bankand stabbed him.The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt,right in the middle of his new consciousness,kind of looking around.
-from Wonderland (2018)
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing elsemattered but to learn some new trick,to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flewoff the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twistedinto a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to runthrough the neighborhood
was to run through ittogether, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almostdon't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gumand how they smelled so differentfrom us, sitting in some kid's basement drinkinghis parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack,jumped in when some one of us got jumped,
so when a man we had never seen beforecame up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walkedover to the manlike someone walking into a bankand stabbed him.The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt,right in the middle of his new consciousness,kind of looking around.
-from Wonderland (2018)
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