Keeping Up With the Dickmanses

I'm trying to keep up with contemporary poetry these days, but I find myself feeling constantly inadequate. Keeping up with anything contemporary can feel futile at times. Literary lava seems to always be flowing and adding to the land before we've defined the boundaries.

Some of the best ways to stay abreast (I always feel weird about using that word) of what's going on in Poetryland is to read journals. I'm one of those browsers who's guilty of skimming around the Barnes & Noble magazine section without buying anything.

At the top of the food chain are publications like The Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker. Basically the widely circulating magazines of poetry superstardom (even though there isn't really such a thing). The next rung is more pure literary magazines: Tin House, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. And the tiers continue on down almost infinitely.

I enjoy reading Slate.com, and didn't realize they published poetry until about a year ago. Online poetry can be hit-or-miss given that anyone (including me!) can put their poems on the internet, but Slate is very reliable.

While I was at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, I had the pleasure of hearing Alan Shapiro read his poem "Eggrolls," which appeared on Slate back in 2005. If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend reading this poem. Alan Shapiro's poems are wonderful, and have this magical, nostalgic quality. He also happens to be a really nice man who was quite entertaining.

Matthew and Michael Dickman, the poetry-writing twins who were profiled in the New Yorker last summer, have become the only poster boys for poetry that I've seen in my lifetime. Matthew was an assistant in a workshop I was in last summer, and though he claimed to still be poor enough to require him to work at Whole Foods, I sensed that this was disingenuous. Sure, most poets who are famous don't make money, but I wondered how he could hold a job at Whole Foods if he's traveling giving readings and attending conferences half the year?

Given that they're twins, a comparison of their work is inevitable, and as a twin myself I feel entitled to compare. Their styles couldn't be more different--Matthew is given to overabundance, chaos, and the ecstatic experiences within everyday life. Michael uses pared down language, more abstract and contemplative, and intense structures.

I think I prefer Michael's poetry, though Matthew seems to be the peoples' champion due to the accessibility of his poems. Michael was the first to be "discovered" and then convinced his publisher to take on his brother--aww, how sweet.

Judge for yourself: Matthew or Michael?