Reconceiving a child’s dramas
Matthew Dickman has a story from his childhood, a frightening one about a flash of violence during a sleepover at a friend’s house in Southeast Portland, Ore., where he grew up. It involves a Bones Brigade sticker being innocently tacked on top of a light switch and a father coming home later that night and reacting in a whirl of abuse.
The poet recalls the memory with nonchalance over the phone from his home in Portland. If it had happened to him now as an adult, he says, it would have certainly lingered with him in a different way. But as a child, what happened simply happened — the boys just went back to bed, then skateboarded the next morning.
“One of the amazing things that children do, one of the scary things, is that they are often professionals at compartmentalizing or normalizing something that doesn’t seem normal,” Dickman says. “Something violent will happen, and the next moment you’ll just walk to the corner store to get an RC Cola.”
That story never became a poem, but this is all to say that Dickman’s new book of poetry, “Wonderland” — the tender and troubling, dark and glowing follow-up to his much-buzzed-about “All-American Poems” and “Mayakovsky’s Revolver” (and two other collections he wrote with his fellow poet twin brother Michael Dickman) — is in some ways the product of decompartmentalizing these memories of a bygone Portland. Dickman says the story was no spectacular event in his childhood, and in “Wonderland,” we get the sense that this sort of male rage and the environment it fosters is darkly and casually omnipresent.
“These are the parts of my childhood I’ve dreamt into to write about, because they’re the parts that I’m still kind of grappling with,” Dickman says. “They’re the parts that now sort of surprise me.”
Throughout the collection, a set of poems, titled by different hours of the day and each containing its own hypnotic refrain (“I went,” “I lost,” “I made”) provides impressionistic details on Dickman’s life as an adult — the often tortured and haunted result of the childhood that the rest of “Wonderland” depicts.
In the book, those early years are full of glimpses of sudden violence and hidden traumas, which often simultaneously mix with tenderness, love and indeed a certain sense of wonder. (“That was always the spirit of childhood, even if your childhood was darkened by certain things.”)
The book is partially anchored by a recurring set of poems, each titled “Wonderland,” which provides an individual portrait of Lents, the Portland neighborhood where Dickman grew up, through a boy named Caleb. Tracking the arc of his life, it depicts “the kind of bulls—, but very real and very sincere contract that the neighborhood offered the boys,” he says. “A particular contract about what masculinity meant, what being tough meant, what being white meant and what being a boy meant.”
“Wonderland” situates us in that now-buzzword phrase of the white working class, in a community where racism and white supremacy festers as normalcy. In this way, Dickman says he wants his book to force a conversation about race, about whiteness, that white Americans themselves often don’t have.
But that’s not the agenda or source of these poems.
“I didn’t write about these things because I think they’re shocking or because I’m trying to academically figure out some sort of theory about low-middle-class white communities,” he says. “I was just dreaming into my childhood and trying to — I don’t know — offer it something. Offer it some sort of peace offering by hopefully writing in an empathetic and generous way about it.”