Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials for Spontaneous Prose” principle number 20 reads: “Believe in the holy contour of life.” Matthew Dickman’s 2008 collection, All American Poem, takes this principle and inflates it to the point of bursting; chaos, pain, and the baser instincts of humanity are tools for, as Dickman writes, “scraping for joy.” Dickman’s collection is so singular—so quintessentially, endearingly strange—that you would be forgiven for thinking it predated Kerouac. Really, Kerouac’s 20th principle reads as Dickmanesque.

 

Much like the Beats, Dickman utilizes automatic, spontaneous free-verse and carnal, bawdy metaphor to capture something essential about 2008 America that still resonates. Both Kerouac and Dickman saw Americans grappling with economic insecurity, alienation, and war, as the veil was lifted on the American Dream’s promise of prosperity.

 

We find ourselves in a similar place today—2025 America is entrenched in political upheaval and collapse, while young people struggle to achieve the milestones previous generations relied on as touchstones of a well-built life. Yet unlike the Beats and their cynical disdain for modern life, Dickman instructs his readers on how to live through pain and build something beautiful in its wake, whether they’re reading from 2008 or 2025. His verse arrives at the pleasure principle, or philosophical hedonism. In America, Dickman tells us, tragedy abounds and we make messes of the world and each other, but there’s something profound in even being able to witness it at all. 
 

The collection’s title poem exemplifies how form and structure convey meaning as much as language itself. At nine pages, it’s the longest poem in the collection and reads closer to spontaneous prose than meticulous verse. The poem’s first scene plays out like a narrative: the speaker yearns for the drama of a shotgun wedding, envisioning the two of them running off together on a great American road trip. They address states: 

Give us a kiss Hawaii. Who says we’re not an empire? Fuck ‘em, 
they need Jesus. They need the Holy Ghost. 
Right Kansas? Kansas! My yellow brick road of intelligent design. We are not 
monkeys. They’re all in prison, right Texas?

Read aloud, these lines are gasping for breath, energetic and eager. Speaking them creates urgency and momentum that matches the passion in the speaker’s tone. Dickman’s long-winded verse captures the essence of America and its ideals of freedom and excess. There is a linguistic motif throughout the poem that nods to the American sentiment of vastness:

You can go from one daughter to another
and eventually end up with your own. You can go from one
Founding Father to another and still have the same
America. The same Alaska. The same Baked Alaska
served on a silver plate in the same hotel
where the wait staff are all South American. 
The same cows sleeping
in the same Wyoming with the same kids
getting drunk, shooting cans, peeing on the electric fence.

Dickman’s phrasing is a conduit for meaning. The formal elements of “All American Poem” reflect the excess, freedom, grandeur, and desire of American mythology.
 

Dickman pays particular attention to imagery and metaphor as conduits for meaning. All American Poem notoriously utilizes imagery of sex in unexpected ways:

When I’ve had the shit beat out of me, my friends
who have died their violent deaths and accidental
deaths, falling from windows, swerving
into the lights of traffic, my suffering,
my unearned joy, my hand reaching up
through the yards of fabric that made your dress

Dickman’s carnal and bawdy images convey deeper truths, both through their juxtaposition against loftier ideological themes, and through their proximity to pleasure. In “Love,” the speaker argues for lust and longing:

If the world knew how
much they loved each other
then we would all be better off. We could all dive head first
into the sticky parts. We could make sweat
a religion. 

When Dickman melds the carnal with the holy, they are never competing, but informing one another. The final lines of “Love” solidify the marriage of the physical and the ideological, plainly and earnestly stating:

I know a man who loves tanks so much 
he wishes he had one
to pick up the groceries, drive
his wife to work, drop his daughter off
at school with her Little Mermaid
lunch box, a note
hidden inside, next to the apple, folded
with a love that can be translated into any language: I hope
you do not suffer.

Dickman is at his most effective and masterful when a poem begins with specific images and bawdy references, but lands on tender emotional truth. 

Food imagery also facilitates the collection’s pleasure principle. In “Some Days,” a poem largely set in restaurants, Dickman writes of a patron named Carl:

each time he picked up
the warm bread 
and placed it to his red mouth, he was not
thinking of how much he’d lost 
or who he would love desperately 
with nothing but wind 
moving through his hands like a rope.

In All American Poem, the most minuscule details of everyday life, like eating bread in a café, offer respite from a harsher social, cultural, and political landscape. The collection was published in a year in American history defined by The Great Recession, the Iraq War, and a housing crisis. Certainly, this bleakness runs throughout the poems. Yet, this landscape is transcended by Dickman’s attention to the sheer variety of life, where everyday pleasures are what define even a destitute American life. 

All American Poem is strewn with idiosyncrasies and humorous one-off lines, notably those that facilitate lightness and irreverence when juxtaposed against war, corporate America, historical tragedies, and violence:

I could pay off my bills. You could strip
in some dive on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. 
Let’s bite each other on the neck.
Oh my sexy Transylvania!

 

Lines from further along in the title poem encapsulate the function of this juxtaposition: 
 

This is the Fourth of July
and she looks like the end of summer. She’s a wind
moving through the trees. She’s the best thing 
about high school assemblies. We are a country at war 
and she’s passing a note to you in class.

Broad-scale tragedy and anxiety are punctuated by lust and longing. Dickman is not interested in overlooking or side-stepping his troubled American context; rather, he looks it dead in the eye and retorts, refusing to succumb to cynicism. 

An effective encapsulation of Dickman’s project occurs in the opening to “The World is Too Huge to Grasp,” the collection’s final poem. The speaker begins:

Still, tiger, there’s no reason 
not to tie your wife up 
if that’s what she’s been dreaming about 
in traffic. No reason not to 
go out and eat twenty doughnuts.

Here, Dickman’s automatic, prose-like verse reflects freedom as an American ideal, while the line breaks simultaneously convey a tongue-in-cheek nihilism. The most meaningless details of a life are really where the meaning lies. And perhaps most compellingly, All American Poem arrives at a sort of philosophical hedonism.

 

Amidst economic strife and geopolitical conflict, we create meaning not through ideological perfection, but by living out mundane, ordinary life. Dickman’s verse reminds us how beautiful it is—how ultimately, we’d be fools to stop endlessly wishing for it. 

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