#james dickey

James Dickey: Deliverance (1970)

“Fishing is necessary to me because of the combination of practicality and mysticism that it holds. When a human being beholds a fish in its anti-human and fascinating element, there is a vibration like no other.

The poet D. H. Lawrence has worded this feeling of the man-fish encounter as well as anyone has ever done. Of the pike, he says:

       I made a mistake, I didn’t know him,
       This grey, monotonous soul in the water,
       This intense individual in shadow,
       Fish-alive.

       I didn’t know his god,
       I didn’t know his god.

I began fishing with a handline, and I still love the form of the art. This was in an estuary off the south coast of Georgia, and though my family origins were in the mountains of the northern part of the state (and therefore my loyalty should logically be to the fly-rod and the trout), my ideal notion of fishing, of true fishing, of fishing itself involves the nerves of my hand as they sink by means of the line into the alien, creative darkness, and wait there.”

James Dickey, from “A Hand-Line: In Pursuit of the Grey Soul,” Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords (Bruccoli Clark, 1983)