We Who Are Young

About the Book

Some of the poems in this volume may be found mediocre, others, less so. Some are more recent; some still less so, if you favor that sort of thing—stanza poetry that rhymes and is oblivious of political currents. I happily publish them all. Assembled without regard for composition date, they can be viewed, for better and worse, as mature poems. The same indifference may account for their unevenness. This being my third collection, these pieces can, in some respects, be considered leftovers. They needed to be published to bring to closure the sensibility that formed them. It’s not the sort of sensibility you can carry into older age. If this sounds like abandonment, it isn’t. I mean to continue tweaking the muse, but from a different angle. Youth is the best time, and the concerns of youth are the most poetical. That season and its concerns are represented by the poems in this volume. May we grow as we go.

About the Author

Robert Dickerson has crafted poetry for some forty years and by his own admission, is ‘not exactly a beginner.’ His pen has produced several volumes-worth of verse. He celebrates the ‘formal’ and cultivates the ‘science’ of poetry, though he believes the degree of spiritual refi nement in the voice distinguishes the poet. His poems revel in the concrete and he believes in the poem as object. He advocates a natural voice, the primacy of the idea and the translation of the ordinary. His ethic insists that, mathematics aside, all that passes for truth in human affairs is rooted in need and tribal belief. He welcomes the return to poetry of transparency and design and prefers a poetic of mood and word magic to a poetry of politics. In his view, a poem is a ‘joke’ whose punch-line yields enlightenment. He avoids the ‘confessional’ mode as being ‘too full of itself ’. To learn the craft of poetry he recommends practice and constant alertness to poetic possibility. He also recommends reading the greats.