The Ideal City
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About the Book
Robert Dickerson has crafted poetry for some forty years and by his own admission, is ‘not exactly a beginner.’ His pen has produced several volumes-worth of verse. He celebrates the ‘formal’ and cultivates the ‘science’ of poetry, though he believes the degree of spiritual refi nement in the voice distinguishes the poet. His poems revel in the concrete and he believes in the poem as object. He advocates a natural voice, the primacy of the idea and the translation of the ordinary. His ethic insists that, mathematics aside, all that passes for truth in human affairs is rooted in need and tribal belief. He welcomes the return to poetry of transparency and design and prefers a poetic of mood and word magic to a poetry of politics. In his view, a poem is a ‘joke’ whose punch-line yields enlightenment. He avoids the ‘confessional’ mode as being ‘too full of itself ’. To learn the craft of poetry he recommends practice and constant alertness to poetic possibility. He also recommends reading the greats.
About the Author
Robert Dickerson has crafted poetry for some forty years and by his own admission, is ‘not exactly a beginner.’ His pen has produced several volumes-worth of verse. He celebrates the ‘formal’ and cultivates the ‘science’ of poetry, though he believes the degree of spiritual refi nement in the voice distinguishes the poet. His poems revel in the concrete and he believes in the poem as object. He advocates a natural voice, the primacy of the idea and the translation of the ordinary. His ethic insists that, mathematics aside, all that passes for truth in human affairs is rooted in need and tribal belief. He welcomes the return to poetry of transparency and design and prefers a poetic of mood and word magic to a poetry of politics. In his view, a poem is a ‘joke’ whose punch-line yields enlightenment. He avoids the ‘confessional’ mode as being ‘too full of itself ’. To learn the craft of poetry he recommends practice and constant alertness to poetic possibility. He also recommends reading the greats.