Poetry
DISPOSED
By Steve Dickison
In a polyphonic rhythm Disposed picks you up and holds you. This series of 19 poems pops and snaps with a day's tattoo, registering the patterns of interference and exchange between the inner atmosphere of the mind and the external pressure of the moment. Dickison's line is a groove, asking you to double back, slide through, on to the reverberating end of each intricately layered composition. In Disposed, now is a weather, seductive, volatile, and dazzling with flashes of articulated experience. When you step into its vernacular crackle, the whole place sings.
I'm hooked on just how he attaches
those jazzical slices of the current dense.
Listen here and know that ceaseless
connection of the Poem Most High.
—Clark Coolidge
"Palpable", as one is titled: astute, uncalculated thought. "The scattered nature of reality" [Spicer, from the epigraph] coalesces as dream does when it wakes to itself as dream. As though the dead spoke through each instance, seen from here as experience, in a language utterly strange: more intimate than's usually bearable.
—Sarah Menefee
Steve Dickison is a poet, writer, editor-publisher of the small press Listening Chamber, longtime director of the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, and lecturer in the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Recent writings appear in Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House Press, 2004), Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1999), and in the magazines Both Both, Shiny, Crayon, 26, Shuffle Boil, and Fourteen Hills. With David Meltzer, he co-edits Shuffle Boil, an occasional music magazine with poet, artist, and musician contributors.
2007 56 pages $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-942996-62-3
