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Dickey gives poetry in What Wisconsin Took
By Michael Worringer
Library Communications
Posted 6/26/2006
MADISON, Wis. -- In What Wisconsin Took, the latest Parallel Press poetry chapbook, Paul Dickey's Badger-state-tinged poetry personalizes the shared human experiences that define us all.
Dickey is at his best writing about life, death, and all the love and lost love in between. In "A Kind of Thief We Barely Noticed," Dickey reacts to death, an unwelcome guest in his house: "He sculpts your face and hands / after his image, chips away / flesh he no longer desires. / In the family room, he claims / his full share of an old man's / last air. I can't take it anymore." In "How the Lovers Became Different," Dickey writes of a late night talk that reveals the confusion love can bring, "And he couldn't say she was right, / and he couldn't say she was wrong, / so he said, you can say that again."
Along the way, Dickey references many aspects of Wisconsin life throughout his poetry--locations such as Door County and the Fox River, events like maple syrup harvesting and Memorial Day cookouts, and many sports references as well.
In the mid-1970s, Dickey published in quality literary journals, including Nimrod, Karamu, Quartet, and Kansas Quarterly. Since 1980, he has owned and operated an out-of-print book business and pioneered the use of the personal computer and the World Wide Web in the antiquarian book trade. After taking a long hiatus from writing, Dickey started to publish again in 2003. He has published in nearly fifty print and online journals. Recent work is in Rattle, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Swink Online, and Cider Press Review.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. What Wisconsin Took is its 43rd poetry chapbook.
Poetry chapbooks may be purchased in groups of six for $50, or $10 each. or more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison , WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from What Wisconsin Took called "How Dickeyville, Wisconsin Might Have Got Its Name"
I tell my wife, as we drive up highway 35 from Dubuque,
how my great-great-grandfather, a War of 1812 veteran,
settled a farm here. To myself, I worry: did grandmother
tell me this, or did I make it all up? I remind myself
that no one needs to know that grandfather was born
in Iowa to a woman part Chippewa, that my line
of the family got lost, stuck in an adolescent rebellion
for 150 years, but that no one remembers why.
We couldn't find the nerve to come home,
and after a few generations we moved on
to Oklahoma. You know how families go.
I crow that I am bringing the family back to forgive--
to Wisconsin, the land where we first landed
and loved America. I stop at the antique store
across the road from the water tower, and walk in
anonymously. I don't want to say too soon that my name
is Dickey and become an instant celebrity. I try to be
nonchalant. I ask how Dickeyville got its name.
They shrug. No one knows. A codger smokes a pipe,
rocks in the back corner next to a wooden Indian.
He could be an ancient cousin. He is the spitting image
of Uncle Elmer. He asks if I have seen the famous
Grotto from 1930. You simply got to, son, he says.
Now I know. This town might better have been
Kieler, settled by the good German Catholic Johannes
Kieler and named when son George opened a post
office. Or the ghost town Burton, where Daniel Burt
built a steamboat to navigate to New Orleans.
Dickeyville got its name like I did--a last minute
date, the first man with whom my mother happened
to love and later married, for my sake. Except whatever
happened in the 1840s, Wisconsin was not watching.
