- I remember something the late Randall Jarrell once said about that.

He said, "A writer is someone, a poet is someone who spends his whole life standing out in thunderstorms, hoping to be struck by lightning.

(George laughing) Once, struck once, authentically struck, he's remembered.

A half a dozen times, and he's great."

(George and James laughing) (calm music) (brass instrumental) (brass instrumental continues) - Hello, I'm George Plimpton, and our guest today on "Writer's Workshop," is a writer who's done many things.

He's worked in advertising, he's acted in a movie, he shoots crossbows, and is the scourge of snakes with his curious weapon.

And despite the fact that he's written a bestselling novel that later became a smash hit movie, "Deliverance," he still considers himself as first and always, a poet.

His view is justified, I think, by his position as a poetry consultant of the Library of Congress, by the National Book Award he won for Buck Dancer's Choice, and by a television first, his reading of "The Strength of Fields" before an audience of millions during the Carter inauguration.

His name is James Dickey.

And despite his personal success, he isn't gonna tell you that any kind of writing is easy.

Dickie says, with a little luck, and a lot of talent, you might write something that will last longer than you do.

But if you don't really love writing, if you don't have the kind of determination that would make you dig ditches or sweep the streets in order to continue, then you're better off doing something else.

So that's the love/discipline attitude we'll hear about, as James Dickey talks with William Price Fox, and the students, on "Writer's Workshop."

- The essence of poetry is concentration of meaning, and depth of meaning.

In a way, I think, I think that the major influence on prose fiction these days, not only in America, but in England, is the major influence on fiction is poetry.

The ones, the fiction writers that are the most paid attention to, are the ones who have, who have learned more, most from the poets, and who try to write, to write like 'em.

I think of people like John Updyke, who was very much influenced by poetry.

James AG was the same way, and many another.

You either do that, apparently, or either you end up in the dust bin with James T. Farrow, you know.

Who was sort of the anti-political prose fiction writer.

He was following Dreiser.

And so on.

And so, but the main difference is in the, is in, as far as poetry is concerned, and the distinguishing of that from prose fiction is, is in the, first, is in the concentration and the depth of the language, and the, and the reverberations that the words give off, that they don't need in prose fiction.

And is sometimes a hindrance in prose fiction, but are the very guts of poetry.

That's one component.

And the other one is the deliberate use of some sort of rhythmical factor in poetry, or a recurrence of stress in poetry that you don't have in most fiction.

And in some prose, such as the prose of the Old Testament, for example, or some of Thomas Wolf, or some of Melville and so on, there is something of that approaches a regular irregularity of rhythm or accent and so on.

But oddly enough, or paradoxically enough, it's ineffectual in prose.

It's not effect, or at least it's not effectual, as effectual as it would be if it had a linear arrangement such as a good poet would've given it.

In other words, the regularity of rhythm in Melville, in the parts of Moby Dick, say like in the chapter in "The Whiteness of the Whale," is a sort of a chance thing.

It's not really controlled and organized like a good poet would like if somebody like Dylan and Thomas would've done it.

- Jim, could you discuss what Thomas does?

I mean, Dylan Thomas.

- What Dylan and Thomas does?

- Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

- Well, first of all, first of all, the main thing that Thomas, Dylan Thomas has as a poet, is that he is profoundly original minded.

He is original minded.

It's not, there's no fakery about it.

Hart Crane is a very original poet, but he arrives at his originality by theory.

Thomas arrives at his through the viscera.

And because he's actually like that, he sees things, he sees things in a way that's unique to him.

He also has an ear, which is as unique as his, as his vision of things is.

And when he puts 'em together, you get that, you get those, you get that tremendously powerful rolling South Welsh accent.

And you get it coupled to a sort of a vision, which is a, which is a compound of surrealism, a personal brand of surrealism.

And what else, what else would you say?

Sort of a song like ultra rhythmical sort of a component.

If you listen to Dylan Thomas, you can tell, you can tell immediately what I mean.

I mean, let me just abstract a couple of lines from him.

From a, from a, a poem that's not one of his best.

Open a pathway through the slow, sad, sail, throw wide to the wind, to the wings of the wandering boat, that my voyage may begin to the end of my wound, that all this is a curious mixture of surrealism, freudianism, nautical imagery, stuff about the sea, and the wind, and the search, navigation.

All of this comes into a curious amalgam.

but with a tremendous and highly individual thrust of Dylan Thomas' language, it seems inevitable.

Anybody, the idea of someone opening a pathway out through a sail, who but him would've thought of that?

And yet, to him, it's just natural to say it that way.

It occurred to him and puts it down that way.

His personality is on it.

And he goes on.

He goes right ahead with it.

He doesn't have any doubts.

And that's good.

That's why you like him so much.

He has no doubts about what he's doing.

There's no hesitation about it.

It seems inevitable.

- Do you- - That's a good description.

- Yeah.

- Do you feel that he has influenced your poetry?

- No, no.

Not at all.

Anybody that that is has an inimitable or style as he does, if you're a practicing poet yourself, and if you've got any sense, which I have intermittently.

(crowd laughs) the injunction to yourself, as far as your own practice is concerned with what does the Bible say?

"Go thou and do otherwise."

(George laughs) But again, I don't want to, I feel exactly the same way about imitatin' 'em.

You can learn without imitatin' 'em.

I mean, you can learn things.

One of the things that you learn from, technically from Dylan Thomas that you want not to do.

But what you see, if you look at it from the inside, is that what he's doing, is to pack a couple of spawn days into the middle of the line, the net webbed wall.

Or he'll have three hard stresses in the middle of, the middle of the line.

That's inimitable to him.

Nobody does that but him.

But on the other hand, if you do it, it doesn't sound like him, because your usage is not his, and can't be because you're not him.

But somebody who has, I would say, if I were, if I were just calling off the top of my mind, who I think are the most original poets in English, who have the most distinctive sound to 'em, a sound like you said, would say a jazz or a rock musician has a sound, I would say if I were to pick the three most highly individual, just from that one standpoint, I would say, there would be John Dunn would be one of 'em, and Gerard Manley Hopkins would be one, and Dylan Thomas would be the other.

Those would be the three, that are the most unmistakable.

Of those, if I were having an elimination contest, I would eliminate Dunn from those two, and it would leave Hopkins and Thomas, and then I would eliminate Hopkins.

(James laughs) And Thomas is the most original, and the most unimitatable.

You can, you can, if you, if you, if you know as much about prosidy, or almost as much as Hopkins did, you can write like Hopkins, but there's not anything you can do that would make you sound like Dylan Thomas, or anything but an imitation of Dylan Thomas.

I expect a skillful poet, a very, very skillful poet, somebody like John Berryman, could sit down deliberately to write a Hopkins poem.

And to somebody who hadn't read all of Hopkins, would be able to pass it off as an imitation.

You could never do it with Thomas.

Too many, well the source of his value is buried so deep in him, and its lost forever.

The only way we have it now is in his own work.

Thank God we have that.

- Robert Frost said that most people are too shy to have ideas except through the metaphor.

And that makes me think of poetry.

But I wonder how important the metaphor is in prose.

- Well, it, again, it depends on the thing, the use that it's being put to, or what it, what the context it occurs in.

I think, I think a good metaphor is not out of place anywhere, in prose, or verse, or newspaper reporting, or any anywhere else.

Manifests are, some of them are, I mean, it is such a memorable way of establishing a poet, you know?

Memorable if it's good, and unforgettable if it's great.

Some of 'em are very funny.

Some metaphors are very funny.

Some comparisons of one thing to another.

I know that a French poet named Pierre Revere D once said, and I've pondered this a lot ever since I first discovered it in the early 50's.

Someone, you know, how theoretical minded French people are, writers, especially.

Someone asked the other day, "What makes an effective metaphor?"

I said, "Well, let me, let me try to bone down, and get the gist of what the guy is saying."

Because if I knew that, I would know a lot about writing that I don't know.

What makes an effective metaphor?

And he said this, or something close to this.

He said, "When you compare two things, in so far as the two things that are being compared, the points of similarity are the two things that are being compared are farfetched, are far apart, but yet, just.

There you have, that makes for the strong, a strong metaphor.

- Mr.

Dickey, it seems to me that in writing poetry, the whole process has to do with capturing something in words, yet beyond words.

And going about the writing of it, we feel that reading the poem of certain things is as is as important as putting some things in.

- Yeah, sure.

I may have used this metaphor before in class or somewhere.

But someone asked Mozart which kind of music he liked the best, and he has said to have replied, "No music."

(crowd laughs) Which, it doesn't mean that he doesn't like music, commentators have said, it means that he likes, he thinks that the expressive part of music is in the rests, and that the notes, the sounds are only to impregnate the rests, the silences with meaning.

If you listen to Mozart's music, you see how true that is.

♪ Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun.

♪ And I won't go on and on, but- (everyone laughs) it's never been held against me that I could carry a tune.

(crowd laughs) - Yeah, very well.

- Mozart or anybody else's, but you know enough of his music to know the justice of what he says.

That's absolutely true.

(crowd laughs) - Can you comment some more about the forum that you used typographically on the page, how you arrived at this, and what discuss with- - What I do?

- Yes.

- You mean this light stuff?

- Yes.

Yes.

- Well, I've tried to go for something I call "the balanced poem," that sort of, sort of, I like to, I like to have, give it on the page, a sense of precariousness, so that it looks like it's about to topple over, if it's not just exactly stressed up, trued up just right.

What that adds to it, I don't know, but I like to do it.

It's very hard to type up manuscripts that way.

(chuckling) But I like, I like doing that.

And I just, it's the other odd thing lately, I've, for some reason, my former publishers want to print up all my work in new formats.

So, they wanted me to go back and write, write introductions into why I wrote this way at this period, and why I wrote this other way in this other period.

And I told her I'd wrote my publisher, and "I'd be damned if I know why I did it."

It seemed like a good idea at the time, (laughing) but then I went ahead and invented some mistakes and so on.

(crowd laughs) which now that I read the poems in connection with the mistakes, I said, "Well, yeah, that's, that is what I meant.

That's right, Jim.

That's just what you meant."

(crowd laughs) - [George] That's where fiction comes in.

- Yeah.

(George coughs) - I had a, I had a British friend of mines who, (coughs) who shall be nameless, who came to this country, and he was real poet.

But it was just at the time when the manuscript collecting mania had hit the American colleges, and they're buying drafts of people's work, poems and some, had hit the American colleges, especially the University of Texas.

So they, so they offered this fellow, as I say, who shall be nameless, some money for his manuscripts and so on.

But they especially wanted the drafts.

So he told me this, and I stayed of high elation, and then he called me up one night after he'd sold his manuscripts and so on, and the drafts of all these poems to the University of Texas.

But he said, "You know, I was terrified, because I didn't have any drafts of the poems, and that's what they wanted."

So I went and concocted a whole bunch of 'em, and they were a lot harder to write than the poems.

(laughing) You know.

All these bogus drafts of these poems that had already been written.

But that's, that's one of the ways, I guess, that poets survive.

- Longhorn traditions.

(George and James laugh) Love that down there.

- And I can see all these scholars going through these successive drafts, which he carefully numbered, (laughing) to see where his inspiration had come from, how he used it.

(James laughs) - How much do you write?

- Well, it's hard.

It'd be hard for me to estimate, because I don't, I don't have regular hours.

That sort of thing's anathema to me, eh.

It makes it too much like bookkeeping or something.

The way I work is it, it's a creation such as it is in my case, goes on continually 24 hours a day.

I have, usually have three or four things I'm working on at once, and I'll be wandering around the house doing something else, and I'll go look at something in the typewriter, and then I say, "Well, okay, but what's wrong with it is this."

And then I sit down and fool with it a while, and maybe straighten it out some, maybe I can't, but then I'll, I get up.

So this can happen anytime.

It can happen during the morning, or in the afternoon, or late at night, or twilight, or any other time, but it just goes on, and all the projects sort of cross fertilize each other in some weird way that to, at least to me, it's very exciting.

- I heard you say one time that it took you five minutes to think of the plot for "Deliverance."

- [George] It just came to me.

- But I've never heard you say how long it took you to write it.

- Oh, about eight years, I guess.

But that's misleading.

Listen, I scuttle to explain.

(everyone laughs) Because I had, I didn't, when I, when I began to kick around the idea for the novel, it had no high priority on what I was doing.

And I wrote, I think six or seven other books during those same eight years.

And the only time I, the time I began to push to finish "Deliverance," was when I saw that it was at least theoretically possible to finish it, it actually could exist, you know, that it would be... But I had no idea that anybody would publish it, or I didn't know anything about writing novels.

I never published even a short story.

The only thing I'd ever published was poetry and literary criticism.

That's all.

And it came a complete surprise to me.

My God, "Deliverance" is not only a movie and a novel, now it's an industry.

And the, people are always gettin' killed, the press is always saying that... And they never failed to credit, if that's the word, or discredit me with So and so, "Two more victims, river claims two more victims in 'Deliverance' type trip."

And so, and I get all these drunken phone calls from people, and so, still get 'em 10 years after, 10, 12 years after.

It's not the ones that call me up, and tell me they're gonna kill me, because I caused somebody, the relative of theirs to be killed, or they think I did.

But that's not the one that called me up, it's the ones that don't call me that bothers me.

But so far, none of them have shown up either.

- Could you talk a little bit about Hollywood, what you learned out there or didn't learn, or... "I like what I learned out there, Billy.

(everyone laughs) Keepin' it simple."

(George and James laugh) You do like it, you do like it out there, don't you?

- Oh, in a way it's fascinating.

I mean, you, it is such a realm of such an enormous, enormous range of possibilities and power, and especially money.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And the people out there, some of them are so dumb.

I mean, you think, "If these people could be earning all this money, what could I, with my vast intelligence?

(crowd laughs) could not be able to do?

My God, I could own this town."

But after you're out there, well, you don't want to.

(George laughs) No, because, but it's fascinating.

And a lot of very intelligent people will argue with you that this film is the great artistic medium of our time.

It's what the theater was to Shakespeare's time, films are.

- Do you believe that?

- To our time.

I think they are frightening similarities.

- You do?

- Yes, I do.

There's plenty of, that's corrupt in Elizabethan theater too.

It's not all immortal masterpieces.

Not even all of Shakespeare's.

But it's, it's, if we have a parallel, it's got to be that.

Don't you think so?

- I don't know.

I'm- - How do you feel about it?

You talk a little.

(chuckles) - I don't like movies.

I like the occasional movie.

- But I don't, I didn't like 'em all that much either, because if you're a writer, your medium is words.

- Yeah.

- Words, not images - up on a screen, they're words.

- And they have an indiscriminate use, a point of view, which I dislike.

Remember the movie, "Slap Shot?"

- Yeah.

Uh-huh.

- Paul Newman.

Somebody skating around, you know.

The last scene, he's gonna take his clothes off, right?

- Uh-huh.

- Skating around.

So right away I said, "How are you gonna get those pants off, over those skates?"

- Yeah.

(crowd laughs) - And he skates around, and the way they do it, they cut to his girlfriend sweatin' him out, then he cut back and his pants are off.

- Wonderful.

- I mean... (everyone laughs) - The movies can do that, and we can't.

- Well, the trouble with the movie is that, well, the novel says, also tells stories, has so much great advantage over the movies, is that it can tell you what somebody's thinking.

You can't do that in the movies.

Convincingly, if you try to do it, you have to use a voiceover, which is a very, the phoniest of all devices, and the biggest cop out it could possibly be.

- I did like "La Cage aux," "La Cage aux Folles", though.

- I never did see that.

- I thought that was great.

I thought- - I like movies.

And the movies can do some things that you can't do.

A novel either.

If I were to take an example of my own work, I would say that the only- - That was well done.

- The only thing in "Deliverance" that I thought, the two things that in "Deliverance" the movie, that were comparable to the same passages in the book, I think the visual sense of the river, that Vilma Sigman got into film was, that dimension of the novel I wouldn't be without.

I mean, when it opened, that wide screen opens up on that river, you know what I'm, you know what James Dickey's talking about, you know.

Maybe better than you would if you just read about it.

That scene was better.

That part of it was better than the movie version, and the music was better.

And that, you can hear on the screen and in the sound part of the film, which you can't, you've got to describe that in the book.

- Yeah.

- And you don't have that dimension in the novel.

- What encouragement can you give for one who's trying to write?

- Well, to just to encourage that part of yourself, which wants to, which wants to write, and enjoys it, and likes to deal with, with writing on that basis, and so on.

And it's just, I mean, there's something that's added to consciousness when you get, when you get some tremendously expressive way of saying a thing, something that's added to consciousness that cannot be changed.

Literature is full of, full of examples of this solid.

The great writers are the ones that can open up so much of consciousness to people.

As DH Lawrence said, "It can show you how to be, how not to be a dead man walking around."

(George chuckles) - Is there any sort of general advice you could give to aspiring writers?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Ask yourself one question.

"Do I really love it?

"Do I love to write?"

If I, if I, if there were a lot of circumstances that conspired to keep me from writing, would I still write because I love it?

If you can say yes to that, you ought to write no matter what happens to what you write, or what happens to you.

I remember a German writer I once read, a guy I admire greatly, a man named Gottfried Benn said once, "If somebody told me that I had to crawl down gutters and sewers the rest of my life in order to be able to write, I would do it.

If you have that strong a conviction, or even some fair, some variation of that feeling, then you should, that would be the advice, to encourage that in yourself if you have it.

If you don't have it, you shouldn't try it, because it's, the frustrations are too great.

- Do you think that there is a distinctive southern school of poetry at this time?

Is regionalism possible any longer in- - I don't really know.

Those are, those are those questions that don't concern me greatly, although I'm interested in hearing other people talk about 'em.

Vanderbilt, there's a, was very high on the regional, regionalistic concept of the artist, and with cultural pluralism, and local, local inspirations of various sorts and so on.

And I think that's fine, but it's still a bit limiting, I think.

Although I'm a southerner, and a great deal of my sensibilities is, what would you say?

Determined by the fact that I'm a southerner is, is, I don't, I don't have any wish to be doctrinaire about it, or chauvinistic at all.

It's, after all, some of the things that I write about are like fox hunts for example, are Southern, but a lot of 'em are like, like air raids over enemy territory at night are not southern, but they're, they're what?

Nightmare.

The country is nightmare rather than Appalachia.

(George chuckles) International, delusion, bloodshed, horror.

- As the years go by, has it become easier or harder for you to write?

- Much harder.

- Why so?

- Much harder, because the problems are difficult, more difficult.

And what I'm trying for is more difficult.

- How do you keep your enthusiasm up then?

- All I have to do is pick up a pen.

(woman laughs) - No writer's block?

- No.

- Great.

- I've read where writers feel a strong sense of power.

Do you feel that at all?

And can you tell us a bit about that?

- Yes, I do.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't write unless I did feel it.

As you get older, see, I'm 58 now.

As you get, as you get older, you lose things.

You know?

You lose people, you lose hair, you lose teeth, you lose, you lose life eventually.

But, but to a writer, he's got something that he's battling against the great wall of darkness with, something that other people don't have.

I mean, he's got something that, something that will, with very great luck, will stand up and speak for him for many untold years.

It might, probably it won't, probably it'll be forgotten as fast as he is or faster, but it might not, as you, you can't tell.

I remember something the late Randall Jarrell once said about that.

He said, "A writer is someone, a poet is someone who, who spends his whole life standing out in thunderstorms, hoping to be struck by lightning."

(James laughs) Once, struck once, authentically struck, he's remembered, a half a dozen times, and he's great.

(James and George laugh) - Jesus.

So we're out there in the stone, you, me.

- This is George Plimpton thanking you for participating in our writer's workshop.

Please join us again next time.

(brassy instrumental) (whimsical chime)