Dickmania! A New Curated Collection

23 Sandy has the great luck to be located in Portland, a hotbed of poetry, and the home of four young poets who are making an impressive name for themselves on the national scene these days. Those four poets, Carl Adamshick, Michael Dickman and his twin brother Matthew Dickman, and Mike McGriff are featured in several broadsides and artist books that we carry here in the gallery. One of the newest broadsides is Savages, which was recently published by Wendell Buck and features a poem by Dorianne Laux celebrating these "boys."

The subjects of Savages refer to Ms Laux as their “poetry mom.” About this poem Laux has written:

“Joe and I would drive up from Eugene to Portland and meet the boys at our favorite haunt, Powell’s Books. We knew we’d find them, as we always did, in the poetry section. Sometimes they sat crossed-legged in a semi-circle, heads bent, or sprawled out flat on their stomachs, reading to one another aloud from whatever book they’d discovered. Usually we’d make ourselves known with stage whispers, or pretend we were bookstore cops or the poetry police, demanding to know just what they thought they were doing. All four would leap to their feet with shouts and whoops and we’d go off to lunch." ...

To celebrate the release of this fantastic broadside we have assembled a Curated Collection of broadsides and artist books featuring the words of these terrific poets. Special thanks to Gabriel Boehmer for coining the title Dickmania. Used in a sentence, "The whole city of Portland—no, make that the entire Pacific Northwest—seems to be under the spell of Dickmania, a condition marked by a fondness and excitement for all words written by four remarkable young poets."