John Dickson is well loved by anyone
who has read his work. He has over 500
poems published in numerous journals and anthologies .
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DECEMBER 9, 1990
SUNDAY MAGAZINE
Page: 22
A Fair Trade
After 43 Years As A Grain Broker, John Dickson Now Deals In
Poetry
By Nicolette Modaber.;
''SOMETIMES I FORGET THE WHEAT IN ME/JUST AS I forget the lung
swell or blood flow,'' writes Evanston poet John Dickson. His 43 years as a grain trader at the
Chicago Board of Trade sprout through his poems as he portrays ''grain men . .
./ talking their price per bushel/. . . betting their lives on sun and rain and
frost,/ always knowing the weather long before it comes.'
Since his first poem appeared in Harper's in 1968, Dickson has
been published more than 300 times in more than 40 journals, including the
Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Quarterly and the prestigious Poetry
magazine. Two books of his poetry have
also been published-''Victoria Hotel'' (Chicago Review Press, 1979) and
''Waving at Trains'' (Thorntree Press, Winnetka, 1987). His poetry has even appeared on CTA buses.
Dickson has won several awards in national and international
poetry competitions. Last January he
was selected as one of 97 writers from more than 2,000 applicants across the
U.S. and several foreign countries to receive a fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, a federally funded organization designed to foster the
excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts.
''I applied for it in March of 1989 and then forgot about it,''
he comments as he sits in a booth at one of his Evanston hangouts, a fast-food
restaurant, to talk about his craft.
''I started to suspect something was up when the government sent me a
postcard last December, asking if I took drugs.
''It might not be good to tell everyone about the award,'' he
says, ''because then they'll think it's easy to write poetry. It's a tough craft. I personally have a difficult time doing
it. I did six rewrites of the same poem
last week.''
He adds a packet of sugar to his cup and stirs it with a pen.
''They call me 'Mr. Tea' here because that's all I ever order,''
he comments. ''Edna St. Vincent Millay
said something once about poetry being well-sculptured. At first I didn't understand, but then I
thought, 'God, you really have to chip and chip and get the surplus off.' ''
Dickson has been writing most of his life. He sold his Board of
Trade membership in 1979 to devote himself to it full time. However, he never viewed grain trading and
writing as incompatible.
''People can do more than one thing,'' he says
emphatically. ''I was writing while I
was at the Board. There were people
there who raised tropical fish. People
were singing when they were building the Pyramids. They were singing when they picked cotton. There's no inconsistency. You can't just be strictly business. I think you would go crazy. Everybody down there does something. I still trade now and then, but I do it over
the phone.''
Dickson's free-verse poetry reflects Chicago with such subjects
as the Aragon Ballroom, Rosehill Cemetery, the Victoria Hotel and the
Ravenswood ''L.'' He writes of our
artists and heroes: Isadora Duncan, Glenn Miller, Ronald Colman. His
involvement with the poetry community in the Chicago area includes membership
in the Poetry Club of Chicago, Poets and Patrons and serving as treasurer for
Thorntree Press.
For the last 15 years, Dickson, a Chicago native, has been a
weekly participant in the New Trier Extension Poetry Lab in Winnetka. He contends that the discipline of attending
the class forces him to write a new poem or revise an old one every week. Because more than half of his life was spent
in the trading pits, Dickson seeks noisy settings such as restaurants to do his
writing.
''Never speak of your private river that flows in its hidden
place,'' he wrote in ''A Faraway Place.''
Yet he speaks often of his ''private river'' wherever people
will listen to his poetry: Northwestern University, churches, schools, bars and
private homes.
He reads his poems in a plaintive voice, making his craft seem
effortless as he speaks of-
Spring:
It's April, and I'm slowly turning green.
Unwanted dinner parties:
We are strapped to our chairs by acceptable manners while
tedious words wait in line to be said.
And even surgery:
. . . what if I don't make it?
. . . and I rise drifting to the snow-white ceiling looking down
while they give shocks to the old husk or pound the ribs trying to bring me
back so I can pay the bill.
''Some people don't change a word they write,'' he
continues. ''They think everything they
do is deathless. But it's not. It's poor quality if you don't revise
it. Once I was riding my bike, and I
wrote down a poem and didn't feel like I needed to rewrite it. That was the only time that happened to
me.''
Dickson and his wife of 43 years, Virginia, live in northeast
Evanston and have three grown daughters. During the summer, he rides around
town on a yellow 10-speed bike with its drop handlebars turned upside
down. Despite his 6-foot height, he
likes to sit taller to get a full view of the road. A pair of half glasses, a pencil and a small spiral notebook are
always tucked in his left shirt pocket to take down images and metaphors in his
irregular handwriting. He often pedals
the six blocks from their home to the library to check out art books.
''Most of my rules for writing are derived from comments from
artists,'' he explains. ''Picasso said,
'If you know what you're going to paint before you start, why paint?' Writing a poem tells you what you have been thinking about. It reflects what's bothering you or what's
exhilarating.''
Dickson started writing while attending Furman College, a
Baptist ministerial school in Greenville, S.C., his first tuition paid for by
an $87 daily double his father won.
''My roommate wanted to go to Juilliard and instead found
himself in this crummy school. He used
to write on yellow pads like you have,'' he says as he leans back in the
booth. ''I thought he was a
writer. So I started writing, too, to
impress some girl from the women's college in town. Years later he told me he was just writing to his cousin. But indirectly he got me started.
''The (daily double) money ran out in a few months, so I did WPA
work, putting in rock gardens and stuff for a year. Came home and worked at Brach's Candy on the West Side. I wrote on the ''L'' as I rode to work and
back. I used to write in the classical
forms, like sonnets, triolets and rhymed couplets. Now some people tell me:
'Oh, you write in free verse. You can't
do the classical stuff.' But I can.''
Dickson is still pondering how to spend his $20,000 NEA
fellowship.
''It costs me 60 cents a day for tea at Burger King. That comes to about $200 per year,'' he says
with a straight face.
He also plans to buy a computer to use for his writing instead
of pounding out his poetry on an old Hermes 3000 manual typewriter with an
''a'' key that sticks part of the time.
''I think that people should do what they feel like doing,'' he
says as he finishes his tea. ''There
are artists who may never amount to anything, and their work may be burned
after they die, but they're doing what they enjoy. I tell people that if I
didn't quit the Board of Trade to write full time, I would've been a
quitter. It takes guts to try something
new.''
Or, as Dickson writes in one of his poems,
''He could have chose to lock himself
in the cloister of his age
with his severance pay and his company pension . . . .
But once in his life, at least,
every man must behave in the grand manner.''
''LANDMARK''
The men who built this house
hummed and whistled and danced with their saws
and hammered nails like the anvil chorus,
cut gingerbread eaves without drawing a line
and tossed them up to some outstretched hand
that fit them in place like they grew there.
And young women with sun in their hair
brought baskets of sandwiches and fruit,
spread a cloth on the ground each workday at noon
to celebrate lunch and talk and laugh,
then leave the men to their pounding.
Studs and joists and tongue and groove,
oak panel halls and parquetry floors,
Italian marble fireplace mantel
and a kitchen that hums as it works.
They built this house to laugh in the morning-
the first house awake in the neighborhood-
but pitched the roof in a certain way
to make quiet afternoon shadows.
And they did a devilish thing or two-
left pathways between the walls for mice
and arranged the bedrooms to mold the children-
the room with the North Star out the window
made one of them feel things would never change
and the one who looked out at the giant willow
had eyes that harbored a private sadness
while one, who slept in the path of the moon,
seemed always a trifle mad.
Unless they're a hundred and ten or twenty
the men who built this house must have gone
with their humming and whistling and hammers and saws
and young women who brought them lunch
back to their land that's no longer there
leaving only the house to remember.
-John Dickson