Book Review

by Kayleigh Wanzer

Poetry and Sibling Rivalry:

The Dickman Brothers

In a society where the written word continues to struggle for adequate appreciation, it may seem that it takes a catchy gimmick to gain notoriety in the literary community.  And upon first glance, twin brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman seem to be just that — ploys for attention from otherwise average writers, their only marketability being the fact that they share similar faces. Because it seems so coincidental and too contrived. Twin brothers who both happen to be poetry geniuses, overcoming a poverty-ridden childhood in the Northwestern United States, only to be profiled by The New Yorker and simultaneously publish poetry collections? It all reads, admittedly, like a made for television movie. Yet behind the hype, high profile interviews, and book deals are two young men with extraordinary amounts of talent. This talent is executed in strikingly different ways in Michael’s collection The End of the West and Matthew’s All-American Poem.

Michael’s collection begins with “Nervous System,” an off-putting and eerie contrast of death and childhood, two reoccurring themes in The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). Michael utilizes spacing for emphasis and shock value, blasting lines at readers like,

“Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been

on fire”

yet contrasts them with sad and hopeful lines like the standout of this opening poem, “When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill.” He fills the pages with as much white space as he does text, creating a symbolic spiral, a mystical puzzle. There are references to addict parents and their equally tragic addicted children in “Seeing Whales” and “Scary Parents.” In “Seeing Whales” after speaking of watching his friend Leif shoot up “when we were twelve” Michael writes,

“Leif laid his head back on a pillow and waited for all the blood inside him
to flush down
a hole

After seeing whales what do you see?”

He draws unlikely comparisons between things. Whale sightings and twelve-year-old heroin addicts, both huge in different ways. “Seeing Whales” links the rushing of water through a whale’s blowhole to the rushing of heroin through an addict’s arm. It links the relief as opiates make their way through the bloodstream to the surprise and elation of seeing a whale. What do you see after seeing whales, what do you see after watching your friend shoot heroin? “The green sea,” Michael answers with a surprisingly fitting simplicity.  “Ian broke his mother’s nose because she burned the pancakes” Michael states blankly in “Scary Parents,” painting the portrait of a family that functions through dysfunction. “No one is singing us to sleep,” he says, not asking for pity, just for the point of saying it. Michael’s poems are consistently disarming, especially in their endings. From “Into the Earth,”

“No one I loved had died for almost two years.
Then Amy bled out
in a bathtub.”

The standout of The End of the West is arguably “We Did Not Make Ourselves,” an epic if Michael would write one, themes spanning from Advent, to self-destruction, to breast cancer, to funerals and death. It is a random collection of spaces and phrases that comes together beautifully and powerfully.

“This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
as we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up

Dogs
Trees
Stars

There is only this world and this world

What a relief
created

over and over.”

The themes prevalent in “We Did Not Make Ourselves” are the ones common through The End of the West; the inevitability of death and the circle of life, watching those you love die and not sure if you want them to come back, absentee fathers and alcoholic grandfathers. It is a collection that, while decidedly postmodern in execution, spans genre and classification. It is poetry that concentrates on form as much as it does word choice, and does so to the reader’s great benefit.

If Michael writes alongside the ghost of E.E. Cummings, Matthew carries with him the spirit of Ginsberg and his beatnik co-conspirators.  All-American Poem (American Poetry Review Press, 2008) is indeed a collection of poetry based in the roots of Americana; Matthew is almost assuredly thinking of Whitman just as frequently as Ginsberg did. But they are also poems entrenched in modernity and the guilt that comes from leaving a predominantly lower-class neighborhood behind. Or at least, attempting to. In “For Joe Sullivan Upon Joining the South-Side White Pride” Matthew writes,

“I want to say you’re leaving
something important behind.
But I know where you come from
and can’t imagine what it might be.”

Interestingly, Matthew’s poems are simultaneously narrative and confessional. When he says “you can carry your groceries home in your public radio tote bag” in “Country Music,” he says it with an air of disgust that can only come from self-loathing. “I wanted someone to beat me,” he later plainly states in the poem. It is honest and it is relatable, two qualities that make Matthews’s poetry as successful as it is.  Unlike his brother, Matthew does not heavily rely on poetic form and spacing. He chooses instead to focus on deep, verbose descriptions of the lives of strangers and connecting back to his own. From “Something about a Black Scarf,”

“At any rate
my neighbors are having sex. I can hear them, I can
smell the coffee they made
when they thought they were still getting out of bed,
and there is something about how the woman is moaning,
how her right foot may be pressed down
against the side of his thigh that makes me think
the man squeezing her nipples has never been in debt.
Has never yelled at her because of it.”

Matthew’s poetry has a strange way of taking the reader outside of the originally planned narrative and then unexpectedly dragging them back in, just when they’ve become attached to a stranger’s sex life.  Just when they are invested in the smell of coffee and sex, the sound of moaning, Matthew reminds the reader of those who are not so lucky.

Every poem in All-American Poem is, ultimately, an epic one, reaching across geographic landscapes, from the snow of Ann Arbor to the rainy Pacific Northwest, telling the tales of misplaced youth. But it is the poem “Lents District,” fittingly enough, that best embraces and explores what Matthew is trying to say. He tells the story of his unfortunate hometown as a guilty observer, easily placing the reader within the torn up streets, within the broken homes. Comparing the daily life to a “musical some rich kid from New York wrote about credit, debt, and then threw in Kool-Aid to make it funny for everyone,” Matthew tells of “furious mothers” who “applied their lipstick that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds,” and fathers that “quietly did whatever fathers do.” He speaks of orchestra pits made up of angry Pit bulls, kick lines of skinheads, “twirling metal pipes, stomping in unison.” Matthew creates beauty within the ugliness of impoverished America. He does not want to be away from it, he embraces the gangs, the violence and the terror for all the poetic beauty it is worth.

“Dear Lents,
Dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,
I am your strange son,
you saved me when I needed saving
and I remember your arms wrapped around
my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around
the school yard
the night Jason went crazy—
waving his father’s gun above his head,
bathed in red and blue flashing lights,
all American, broken in half and beautiful.”

The America Matthew speaks of is one that is rarely spoken of, but he screams it with pride. The red and blue flashing lights, the evictions, the single mothers. What is most important about “Dear Lents” and his entire collection is that Matthew does not shy away from the ugly. He instead finds the magnificence in it and makes it accessible for all readers.

As poets, Michael and Matthew could not be more different. The End of the West is based on the intangible, on the ghosts of dead friends. All-American Poem is ultimately for the disaffected 20- or 30-something, lost in a world of Pepsi products, haunted by the memories of a stolen youth, and as Matthew says in “Country Music,” “something about cigars and bourbon I no longer want to be a part of.” Even when they speak of the same friends, Matthew, too, mentions violence-prone Ian and his junkie mother from Michael’s “Scary Parents,” it isn’t comparable. While Michael finds and forms emptiness, Matthew strives to fill that emptiness with description. Their poems appeal to different parts of the brain and the senses; Michael’s striking emotional chords with simple words while Matthew bases his in reality and examples, placing the reader in concrete places with people we become certain existed, with people we begin to think we know. What is definite, however, is that both Dickman brothers, regardless of what critics say, are worthy of any and all praise coming their way. Their story seem to be a strange fluke, but it is very real, very rare, and deserves our attention.