Wingbeats After Dark [Paperback]

Ray Clark Dickson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2009

Most of Ray Clark Dickson’s formal energy derives from the brilliant jazz-blown waves of participial phrasing.
Over and over again, a prepositional phrase is risen out of stasis by gerund. In the clickety-click ching of
his lines, he delivers the adrenalinic music of the century’s explorers who went off for story and returned
with poems, then went off again. Dickson’s poems insist that, searched well, the world has many astonishing
and sustaining beauties – human, aural, kinetic. And the poems also insist that the inquisitive, fraternal
drive toward the next day is probably the world’s most alluring beauty. To open these pages is to begin that
drive.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ray Clark Dickson is a genius raconteur of the lyric narrative. His poems live in the improvisational git-go
bridge between the elegiac basso and the transcendent alto. This is a poet who knows that when you’re
down and out, willed happiness is a false god. But he also knows that the blues invert their lyrics, that the
sad man who sings well makes us all happy, that the path back is often a lush detour. Like the music of
Rilke’s Orpheus, Ray Clark Dickson’s jazz-inspired verse teaches us how to pull the darkness up from the
gut and give it voice so that we can live keenly in this disappearing moment.
—Kevin Clark, poet and critic, author of Self-Portrait with Expletives

Ray Clark Dickson has consistently amazed me. The clarity, power and breadth of his poetry is something
that one rarely finds these days. He may be the last hitherto undiscovered major voice in American poetry
from the 20th century.
—Mitchell J. Smith publisher with the Kerouac Connection Press

Ray Clark Dickson is the father of the new West Coast Poetry – sings like Blake, burns like Bukowski.
RCD does blue-collar and white-collar poetry in the same laundry. He follows readings here by Derrick
Walcott and Norman Mailer.
—D.G. Wills, owner of D.G.Wills Books

About the Author

For eight decades, Ray Clark Dickson, born in Portland, Oregon,1919, has written with clarity, sensitivity and narrative power. A state track champion, Ray won an athletic scholarship to the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in journalism. An experienced drummer, he formed and led his own l2-piece Big Band, performed during university years and on the road. During World War Two. Ray served in the Pacific Theatre as a Captain in the Marine Corps. In his youth, Ray worked in Oregon sawmills and at coastal ports, absorbing revelations of mountains, the sea, and people he met. He spent a year in Mexico writing narrative poetry and pulp fiction novels during Jack Kerouac’s time there in l952. Widely traveled, he is noted for volatility and resonance of language, fusing traditional forms into street and jazz poetry, and applying antic and complex structures at different levels. First published at nine years of age, Ray has covered most of the 20th century, and now into the 21st continues with Bergson’s concept of Durée, ‘We carry with us all our rolling experience compacted in the ever-growing snowball of our lives.Ray has published hundreds of poems, including 22 in the highly noted Beloit Poetry Journal. He was selected for Beloit’s Anthology (2000) Fifty Years Of The Beloit Poetry Journal, along with inspirational mentors, William Carlos Williams, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Gwendolyn Brooks and others. He has a CD, Cocoloba, background a la Cuba jazz. A publisher’s proof of his sixth chapbook, The San Francisco Pit Band Blues, was requested by UCLA’s  Special Collection, Poetry Archives. The Blood of Butterflies, Red Hen Press, is his tenth book of poetry. Ray was chosen as the First Poet Laureate, city and county, San Luis Obispo, l999, and nominee by the San Luis Obispo Arts Council for State Poet Laureate in 2002.

 

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press; 1st Edition edition (November 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597094587
• ISBN-13: 978-1597094580
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,796,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars From the Back Cover:, November 4, 2009

By 

Ocelot - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wingbeats After Dark (Paperback)

From the Back Cover:

Ray Clark Dickson is a genius raconteur of the lyric narrative. His poems live in the improvisational git-go bridge between the elegiac basso and the transcendent alto. This is a poet who knows that when you're down and out, willed happiness is a false god. But he also knows that the blues invert their lyrics, that the sad man who sings well makes us all happy, that the path back is often a lush detour. Like the music of Rilke's Orpheus, Ray Clark Dickson's jazz-inspired verse teaches us how to pull the darkness up from the gut and give it voice so that we can live keenly in this disappearing moment.
--Kevin Clark
poet and critic,
author of Self-Portrait with Expletives

Ray Clark Dickson was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1919. He has published hundreds of poems, including twenty-two in the Beloit Poetry Journal, and was chosen as the First Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo, California, in 1999.