Self-Interviews was published by Doubleday in 1970, the same year as Deliverance, and it provides the critical and autobiographical context for understanding Dickey’s poetry. The book consists of interviews Dickey conducted with himself — or rather, essays structured in question-and-answer form — covering his childhood in Atlanta, his wartime service, his career in advertising, his discovery of poetry, and his aesthetic principles.
The format allows Dickey to address directly the questions that critics and readers asked about his work: why the obsession with violence? why the fascination with animals? why the long, unpunctuated lines? His answers are characteristically forthright: he writes about violence because violence is a fundamental human experience that most literature evades; he writes about animals because the boundary between human and animal consciousness interests him more than anything else; he writes in long lines because he wants the reader to experience the poem as continuous motion, not as a series of discrete images.
The autobiographical material is valuable for understanding the sources of Dickey’s poetry: the night-fighter missions over the Pacific, the Georgia landscape, the hunting expeditions with his father, and the experience of living in suburban America while writing poems about extreme experience. Dickey is honest about the contradiction: he is a man of violence who lives a bourgeois life, and his poetry is an attempt to bridge that gap.
Collecting Self-Interviews
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10