Education in Wisconsin is done.
Arts and Sciences have packed up and run.
Walker laughs with such glee,
“Ain’t it great to be free?”
while police enforce it with a gun.
June 6, 2015
Paul Dickey, Poet, Playwright,
Author of Fiction,
& Political Libericist
(a totally made-up word, of course)
"On starless nights like this, the poetry wants them
dead or alive."
-- from "The Poetry Doesn't Even Know Where They Live."
They Say This is How Death Came Into The World ISBN--978-0-9321412-99-7
"Whether it's a poem about (or around) Mark Rothko's painting Yellow Band or a prose poem about "Mowing the Lawn" that pauses with Husserl's phenomenology, Paul Dickey excels in creating an unlikely gallery of grotesques featuring-amongst many others-Lou Gehrig, Virgil, Lennon and McCartney, Stephen Crane, Charles Baudelaire, Frank Sinatra, Rainer Maria Rilke and Bob Dylan. Dickey's poetry is grounded in a recognition that, to quote Sherwood Anderson, "each truth [is] a composite of a great many vague thoughts," all equally beautiful and disturbing, somber and happy." - Michel Delville, Author of The American Prose Poem (The University of Florida Press, 1998)
The cover was designed by Judith Kerman and Paul Dickey based of course on Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Schrödinger equation for describing quantum mechanical behavior.
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What Wisconsin Took
ISBN-1-893311-73-2
In What Wisconsin Took, Dickey writes with one eye focused on the history of philosophy and science and the other on a deeply personal but sharable human experience (although appropriately fictionalized-don’t expect accurate biography in the poems). He expects of himself that his work be accessible and frequently comical, but at the same time to demonstrate the intellectual honesty and seriousness that his subjects deserve. Although he prefers mostly free verse and prose poetry, he also writes formal verse, translations, and “flash fiction.”
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Liberal Limericks of 2012
Besides his serious work, Paul Dickey writes political limericks and published an ebook of them on the 2012 political campaign which is still available from Amazon. He call these verses "libericks" (i.e. "liberal limericks' in both the sense of progressive politics and liberal in metrical observance, and the occasional lack thereof). He thus calls himself a "libericist" (although we all know there is no such word). May the gods have mercy on such blasphemy. As an instructor of Critical Thinking, Dickey also provides in this ebook a brief but intriguing primer on "how to read" such rhetoric (which of course is poison to critical reasoning) as admittedly "libericks" are and yet maintain the attitude of a critical thinker. Good luck with that! The cover for the ebook was designed by Ira Joel Haber.
Wires Over the Homeplace
ISBN-978-1-936671-20-5
"Wires Over the Homeplace welcomes the haunting of its forebears, both poetic and personal. Indeed, as Dickey attends to the narratives, gestures, and cadences of the Midwest, those sources are brilliantly conflated. So it is that one speaker praises his father by noticing that the man 'had his own way about words, folks / and things. He respected every tool. Everything / inhabited its own place.' The same could be said of this poet whose candor so honors his subjects. Dickey's way about words-subtle, reserved, but unabashedly tender-is purely his own."- David Clark, Editor of 32 Poems
The book's cover art is by Ira Joel Haber.
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