The Ideal City

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.