Dickey said that he was both "exalted and appalled at the mountain of stuff they have" in this collection. Dickey read several poems and some selections of prose. He began his reading by discussing some of the older poetic manuscripts that can be found in the collection. He jokingly related that in looking through some of the manuscripts, he asked himself "What could I possibly have meant? What on earth was I thinking? But isn't it good."
He read two poems about the nostalgia of going home, including his popular "Looking for the Buckhead Boys" which recalls the strange feeling one has when returning to a place where one has not been for a while. The narrator in the poem believes that if some of the same people from his past are there then he will be the same as he was in the past.
He also read a chapter from his most recent novel, To The White Sea, a selection from his novel Deliverance, and the darkly comic poem, "Sheep Child." He described the poem as an expression of the "universal need for contact which must exist even if it creates monsters who have no place in the world." The poem takes the perspective of the sheep child in a jar of formaldehyde in a museum in Atlanta. Dickey quipped that "for whatever other faults it might have, this poem can't be faulted for originality of viewpoint."
Dickey is currently writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.The acquistion of the James Dickey Papers represents the largest American literature archive at Emory and was made possible by the Floyd C. Watkins Manuscript Fund.
After the reading, audience members were invited to Special Collections to look through some of the collection's holdings while the author signed books.
--Matt Montgomery