Parlando II

About the Book

Most of RCD's formal energy derives from the brilliant jazz-blown waves of participial phrasing. Over and over again, a prepositional phrase is risen out of stasis by gerund. In the clickety-click ching of his lines, he delivers the adrenalinic music of the centurys’ explorers who went off for story and returned with poems, then went off again. Dickson’s poems insist that, searched well, the world has many astonishing and sustaining beauties—human, aural, kinetic. And the poems also insist that the inquisitive, fraternal drive toward the next day is probably the world’s most alluring beauty. To open these pages is to begin that drive. (From Parlando, Kerouac Connection Press, Menlo Park, CA, July 2000)
—Kevin Clark, Ph.D., Essayist, Critic, Poet, Professor of English, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA

About the Author

For nine decades, Ray Clark Dickson, born in Portland, Oregon, 1919, has written with clarity, sensitivity and narrative power. A state track champion, Ray won an athletic scholarship to the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in journalism. An experienced drummer, he formed and led his own 12-piece Big Band, performed during university years and on the road. During World War Two, Ray served in the Pacific theatre as a Captain in the Marine Corps.

In his youth, Ray worked in Oregon sawmills and at coastal ports, absorbing revelations of mountains, the sea, and people he met. He spent a year in Mexico writing narrative poetry and pulp fiction novels during Jack Kerouac’s time there in 1952. Widely traveled, he is noted for volatility and resonance of language, fusing traditional forms into street and jazz poetry, and applying antic and complex structures at different levels. First published at nine years of age, Ray has covered most of the 20th century, and now into the 21st continues with Bergson’s concept of Durée, ‘We carry with us all our rolling experience compacted in the ever-growing snowball of our lives.’

Ray has published hundreds of poems, including 22 in the highly noted Beloit Poetry Journal. He was selected for Beloit’s Anthology A Fine Excess: Fifty Years Of The Beloit Poetry Journal (2000), along with inspirational mentors, William Carlos Williams, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Gwendolyn Brooks and others. He has a CD, Cocoloba, background à la Cuba jazz. A publisher’s proof of his sixth chapbook, The San Francisco Pit Band Blues, was requested by UCLA’s Special Collection, Poetry Archives. The Press Corps of Xanadu, was published by iUniverse in 2007. Wingbeats After Dark, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2009, was his tenth book of poetry. With the Blood of Butterflies, his eleventh book, was published by Infinity Press in 2011.

Ray was chosen as the First Poet Laureate, city and county, San Luis Obispo, 1999, and nominee by the San Luis Obispo Arts Council for State Poet Laureate, 2002.

He lives in San Luis Obispo with his wife of 30 years, Marysia Maziarz, author of Polish-American fiction.